Welcome back folks for day 2 of the PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC. We are 6 or 7 minutes away from getting under way. I’ll be live blogging this morning’s keynote so refresh your page often. I’ll be taking short notes to keep you up to date as opposed to paragraph form.
We are off and running with another packed room. We are seeing a video highlighting attendees and the things they have learned and the things they are most looking forward to. Douglas McDowell, EVP of Finance, hits the stage and is going to give a financial snapshot of the PASS organization. Doug reminds us that PASS is a not for profit organization and the Summit allows the organization to help fund all the other things it does for the community like local and virtual chapters. Doug highlights the various income streams like Summit, Virtual Chapters, and the BAC conference. He mentions that the BAC conference made about 100k in funds.
Doug is highlighting some of the transformations in how budgeting is done. The biggest change is having a rainy day or emergency fund and we now have 1M in reserve. This is a great insurance plan for the organization to make sure it can stay healthy in case of cancelled conferences due to natural disaster or bad turn in economic conditions.
Doug is now showing the different places where PASS is placing its funds. 7.6M in community spending and about 30% is focused on international growth. Doug hands it over to PASS President Bill Graziano.
Bill is thanking the Directors on the board that are moving on. Douglas McDowell is the first. Rob Farley is next who ran the SQLSaturday portfolio. Last is Rushabh Mehta who has been on the board for 8 years serving in Marketing, Finance, President, and Past President.
Bill hands it over to the next President of PASS Thomas LaRock. Tom introduces the board changes and new board members. Our new board members are Jen Stirrup, Tim Ford, and Amy Lewis. Congratulations to them all! I served on the Nomination Committee this year and I know that they will all do amazing things for our community.
Tom mentions the time and dates for the BAC conference and 2014 Summit. He is also telling us about all the amazing things happening this week like the community appreciation party at the Nascar Hall of Fame and the SQLClinic where you can talk to the MS folks that make the product we all love so much.
David DeWitt is on the stage to present his 5th keynote! Today he’ll be telling us all about Hekaton. MS marketing changed the name from Hekaton to In Memory OLTP and David encourages to vote via twitter using those hashtags. David is explaining why MS decided they needed a new query engine. His reason is that the software is mature and processors are starting to top out. A common question he gets is why not just pin the tables in memory? Latches for shared data structures like the buffer pool. He explains how latches work and the contention and CPU they can cause. Now we take a look at the need for concurrency control. We have two simple rules. First is before access the query must acquire the appropriates lock type from the lock manager. The second is releasing the lock. David explains that locking and latches are much more problematic with in memory databases.
Hekaton is a lock free data structure and thus there are also no latches. Hekaton is a third query engine inside SQL along with the standard disk data engine and column store engine. To use Hekaton we start by creating a memory optimized table and it MUST contain a Primary Key. Next we populate the table and that is done just the same as we do today and then it’s ready to use! Typical performance boost is 3x for ad-hoc T-SQL and 5x for Stored Procedures.
David is showing a demo of how a lock and latch free data structure works. David is very proud of his animation! We can see how an updater can run without blocking or slowing down a reader. Due to locking and latches the standard method is burning up!
Now we dive into concurrency control which uses optimistic, multi-version, and time stamps. We’ll look at each of these. Time stamps get a time from the global clock. At the start of the transaction we get a start time and multiple transactions can get the same time, but for the end time it guarantees a unique time. We are zooming in to see how it all works with a single row of data as an example.
David is wrapping up for us as he quickly reviews everything he just covered. Absolutely mind blowing as usual. I’m looking forward to playing with Hekaton myself with a product that has locking hints that cause me huge latch and lock waits. This will also get it off of the disk so I have high hopes.
Thank you all for joining me today at this amazing event! If you want more from the PASS Summit don’t forget about PASStv. I’ll be doing a session on PASStv on Friday. Here is the link. My session is the one on Policy-Based Management and Central Management Server.