Sean

For many MySQL database admins, Amazon Web Services represents the brave new world of cloud computing--one fraught with disappearing servers, disk I/O variability, and other shared resource challenges, not to mention questions regarding the security of data.

But for those seeking to tap the powerful flexibility that cloud computing affords MySQL database deployments, AWS should be viewed simply as the next natural step in data center evolution -- one in which virtualization and commodity hardware are a given, and scalability, performance, and high availability are readily attained.

When Apple sneezes, the world takes interest in ear-nose-throat medicine. So upon learning that their iPhones have been building a bloated file of location data, consumers started wondering if mobile service also means mobile surveillance.

Add the unrelated but scary hacking of Sony's PlayStation and Online Entertainment networks, and suddenly people are thinking about the data they are shedding and who's picking it up.

As much as I really want to do database blogs, I end up writing about bad support organizations quite often. So I thought that today I'd go with a recent support experience that will go down in history as one of the worst I've ever had.

Anyone can sign up for an account at a video-streaming site like UStream.tv or Justin.tv and start streaming themselves to the world, but making a show look clean and professional takes a lot of work, know-how, and experience. That's why I thought I'd take you through some of the lessons I've learned while shooting over 200 episodes of my Web TV show about Starcraft II, the Day[9] Daily.

When Wired hyperbolically declared that "The Web is Dead," it didn't challenge my worldview but rather surfaced what I knew subconsciously. The browser is not always (and increasingly less so) the best window to the Internet - especially on mobile gadgets. For years on my iPhone - and now on my Droid - I've foregone digging around in a tiny browser in favor of burrowing straight to what I want through an app - the New York Times, Facebook, The Weather Channel...

At this week's Web 2.0 conference in New York, John Gruber of blog Daring Fireball tried to illustrate app supremacy by showing the absurdity of an iPad screen with only the Safari Web browser icon.

We're hearing a lot about 3D television these days- from TV manufacturers, directors, journalists and pundits. But do consumers like it? And will they pay for it?

To find out, I convened a mini focus group of adults in their 30s, 40s, and 50s,; a teenager; and a pair of kids under 10. We met at the Samsung Experience store in New York City a few weeks ago. After watching a wild assortment of clips-from The Daily Show to a Dunkin Donuts commercial to Monsters vs. Aliens-they had a mildly favorable impression. But no one was jumping up to buy a new TV and a pile of expensive active-shutter LCD glasses.

Last night I was giving a presentation to our local SQL Server user group at Microsoft in Irving, Texas. A few minutes into my presentation, a security guard bursts in, comes up right beside me, and shouts to the entire room, "Does anybody here work for Microsoft?"

He shouted it again. Someone said, Yeah, I work for Microsoft, and he held up his badge. The guard went over to him and took him out of the room. Then a couple more of the user group board members left.

Looks like Sony may be just as frustrated with their current situation as gamers are, as both sides of the battle are steadfast in their beliefs over the PS3's current price tag. In terms of a price cut, gamers have loudly shouted "Yea", while Sony has clearly shouted back with a deafening "Nay." So, what's the deal here? What's keeping Sony from dropping the price, say $100?

Well, you may find your answers from Sony's president and CEO of Sony America, Jack Tretton and Sony's chairman, president and CEO, Sir Howard Stringer, who both spoke out in separate interviews about the problems of a price cut.

In a surprise appearance, Hideo Kojima, the mastermind behind the Metal Gear series announced today during Microsoft's E3 keynote that he is in development on a completely new Metal Gear title to the Xbox 360.

Hot on the tail of his Oscar nominated work in "The Wrestler", Mickey Rourke has been tapped to play the real-life Navy SEAL and SEAL Team 6 founder Richard "Demo Dick" Marcinko in Bethesda Softworks Rogue Warrior: Black Razor.

Katmai, the code name for Microsoft's imminent SQL Server 2008 release, comes from an Alaskan territory know for volcanoes, which may not be the best symbol for a database. So far, however, Katmai hasn't blown up on me. And the lower-profile Katmai seems like a good follow-on to Yukon, the code name for the gigantic SQL Server 2005 release.

Building on the sweeping, enterprise-oriented improvements in SQL Server 2005 (see review), Katmai sports very nice new features for large deployments. Among the more touted attributes in the database engine are data and backup compression, sparse columns, and compressed and filtered indexes, all of which are geared to saving storage space, as well as Change Data Capture, which captures changes to production data in tables that can be used to update a data warehouse.

[ Compare Katmai to Oracle Database 11g. See "Lab test: Oracle Database 11g shoots the moon." ]

These are just the tip of the iceberg, or volcano, and there are of course many other new features – such as policy-based management – that will appeal to large and small shops alike. Every aspect of the product has been touched significantly.

More Data, Less Storage

For starters, there are two types of data compression: row and page. They do, in fact, compress data in different ways, so it's important to understand the benefits of each, as well as how they work. Row compression is true compression, whereby the engine removes unused spaces at the ends of columns and, thus, saves space. This is the same technique SQL Server already uses for vardecimal compression; Microsoft has just expanded the use to other data types.

Page compression does what's known as dictionary compression, in that it normalizes the data on each page and keeps a lookup pointer. This is essentially the same trick used in Oracle Database 11g, which Oracle calls Oracle Advanced Compression. Without getting too much into the pros and cons of each, it's worth noting that SQL Server's page compression includes the lower-level row compression. In other words, if you have page compression turned on, you automatically get row compression.

Microsoft has included a couple of stored procedures to help you estimate both the level of savings you'll get with each method before you compress, and how much expansion will result if you uncompress the database later. This is an important and really thoughtful feature because you need to know not only if compression will be worth your time, but also if your disk can handle the uncompressed data should you need to revert. Just keep in mind that the procedures work on a small yet statistically significant random sampling of the data. You could get some bad estimates if the query happens to hit a poor representation of your data.

Plus, the way Microsoft implements compression spares more than storage resources. The data stays compressed in memory and only gets decompressed when read, meaning that you can fit more data pages into memory. This should save disk fetches, and the CPU it takes to decompress will be far less expensive than the disk seek would have been.

The sparse columns feature allows you to store null values without taking up any physical space. If you have a large table with a lot of null values in a column, you can waste ample disk space keeping track of those nulls. Storing nulls in sparse columns takes zero space, so your storage requirement goes way down.

One big caveat with sparse columns is that they don't work with compression. Frankly, this is a big mistake by Microsoft, and I hope the company does right by its users, pushing this fix into a service pack instead of waiting for the next release. In the meantime, if you have sparse columns defined on a table, don't expect to compress your data on it as well. I honestly don't know what Microsoft was thinking with this one, but this should never have gotten out the door. Sparse columns and compression are a perfect match; this one may deserve a Darwin Award.

Compressed indexes are just what they sound like: another opportunity to save storage space. Filtered indexes allow you to put a where clause (just like a query) on your index so that only a portion of your table is indexed. It may seem counterproductive, but there are several instances where you would want to filter an index. The perfect example is with sparse columns. Instead of keeping an index that contains mostly nulls, you would put an index on the sparse column where the value does not equal null. This way, only the rows with actual values will be indexed and the size of your index decreases significantly.