Craig Bailey on Microsoft

This one has caught out people for ages, so I thought I'd clarify that it IS possible to connect to SQL Server 2005 Developer edition over a network.

The problem is that the Express and Developer versions of SQL Server 2005 turn OFF remote access by default (Standard and Enterprise have it ON by default). That's why out-of-the-box you can't connect over a network to it. But it's easy to turn on.

Now, you might think that using the SQL Server Configuration Manager is where it all happens. Turns out you need to use the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration tool.

It should be available from:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 > Configuration Tools >

Run it up and choose the configuration for Services and Connections

  Choose the Remote option tab

and make sure you've allowed both Local and Remote connections.

Note: This works with SQL Server 2005. If you are playing with SQL Server 2008 CTPx then you'll have discovered that the Surface Area Configuration tool is no longer available. I'll update you on that front when I've investigated further...

NOTE: I meant to get this out last week but you may have noticed my link blog was down for the best part of a week :-(

Microsoft has released a list of programs that are affected by Vista SP1. Not much to worry about, as most have newer versions available that support SP1.

Zone Alarm and the NYT Reader are probably the main ones that will interest people.

(via ZDNet)

Thankfully, I've had no problems with the upgrade (nor has Schnubbs by the look of things).

Another monster meeting at SBTUG this month.

Presentations

Our first presentation has Mike Culver (Amazon Evangelist) talking about Amazon Web Services. Come along and learn how more than a quarter of a million developers are taking advantage of building applications on the back of Amazon's infrastructure.

Following Mike will be Steve Riley, Senior Security Strategist with Microsoft, talking about all things security related in Windows 2008.

[This month's meeting is combined with the Sydney .NET User Group]

Details

Date: Wed 27 February 2008

Time: 5:45pm

Venue: Microsoft, 1 Epping Road, North Ryde (Map)

Contact: call me on 0413 489 388 if you have any questions

Further details

• Facebook event
• Facebook group
• SBTUG web site 
• The 'Convince Andrew Coates to join Facebook' group :-)

We've done a little more testing of our product on the Microsoft 2008 stack and I'm pleased (and a little worried) with the results.

The pleasing part: we are now showing results on the 2008 stack as being 16X faster than the 2003/2005 stack.

The worrying part: results of 16X faster are very high - what if we've tested something incorrectly...

So, the goal of this post is to explain what we did and how we measured the results. Then, I'm after your feedback on what else we should be checking.

Background

First, the background.

In January we moved our Elcom web site over to the 2008 stack. That is, we recompiled our entire Community Manager application to target the .NET 3.5 Framework, moved to SQL Server 2008 CTP5 as the back-end and hosted it on Windows 2008 Server RC0. We immediately noticed that the site was much quicker. Browsing the site was faster and managing the content (through all the web based administration tools was very snappy). We then did some basic testing by launching 1,000 concurrent requests and measuring the delivery times. You can read the full results on Alan's blog, but in summary, the 2008 stack was 5 times faster. Impressive stuff.

We always wanted to do some more detailed testing, but it wasn't until Windows Server 2008 finally RTMed two weeks ago that we started testing again. This time round the techies wanted to beef up the testing a little.

Latest testing

Whereas our initial testing had been a simple comparison between Windows 2003 Server, SQL 2005 and .NET 2.0 versus Windows 2008, SQL 2008 and .NET 3.5, this time Alan set up testing for all 8 scenarios so that we could isolate which components of the 2008 stack were contributing the most. eg is Windows, SQL or .NET that is giving the improvement.

He also changed the testing method. This time, instead of just firing 1,000 requests he kicked of a loop of 1,000 sets of 20 concurrent requests. This is a more realistic scenario for what our sites experience. He fired this via a wget based Linux bash script.

The machines he used are as follows:

2008 stack machine: Intel Core2 Dual core 2.12 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB Seagate SATA drive.

Testing (Linux) machine: Intel P4 3.0 GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB Seagate SATA drive [ie This machine is acting as a client]

As you might notice, the 2008 stack machine was acting as both the IIS and SQL server. Although not a production architecture, this was deliberate to ensure that network affects were minimised.

Results

Here's the results so far:

A few observations:

1. We haven't finished all our Windows 2003 testing yet. They take almost 4 hours to run, and the guys are fitting this testing all in amongst their normal daily work :-)
2. The main improvement is (obviously) due to Windows Server 2008, and IIS7
3. Running the 3.5 Framework on 2003 with SQL 2005 is actually slower than with 2.0
4. Some of the other results are also puzzling... for example:
5. On Windows 2008, using SQL 2008 is slower than SQL 2005 when we target 2.0 but faster when we target 3.5
6. Happily, the best result is achieved when using the full 2008 stack

If I put the results another way, we can see that adding 2008 components (Server, then .NET, then SQL) has incremental improvements eg

But there's no escaping that the major improvements are all thanks to Windows 2008 Server. In general Windows 2008 is much faster, and our techies have already switched to using it as their desktop OS.

FAQ

Some questions. I'm trying to look at our testing as critically as possible. After all, 1600% improvement is something not to be taken lightly, and there will likely be a few people reviewing these results. So, I want to be clear on where we stand.

The first thing to state is that we are not a certified testing lab. So, this testing has been conducted on simple server hardware, and with tests that are geared to how we operate. We didn't have any of our big rack servers available for testing, so the results are pretty 'real world'.

Q: Why does it take almost 4 hours to do 20,000 requests on Windows 2003? Something must be wrong...

A: Yes, this concerned me as well. But here's what I didn't mention earlier. Each request we submit is returning our home page, plus graphics, plus all links from that page and any graphics and documents from those pages as well (ie wget with the u directive is basically spidering from the page). It turns out that each request is returning 6.4MB of data. Thus, 20,000 request in total is returning about 120GB. This is to emulate load testing the server. With Windows 2003 this takes over 3 and a half hours.

Q: Did you test on a smaller page?

A: Yes, we also performed testing on a landing page that returned 70KB. The results were much quicker, but in the same proportions.

Reducing page size down further to very small (eg an empty page, but still delivered by our Community Manager product) brought the comparisons closer, with Windows 2008 being only 4X quicker than Windows 2003. The 1,000 X 20 concurrent requests took 51 seconds on Windows 2003, but only 12 seconds on Windows 2008.

Q: Are the actual durations meaningful?

A: No, the durations on their own are not that meaningful, since changing hardware will obviously affect the results. What is meaningful is comparing the durations between the different scenarios.

Q: Did you try on different hardware?

A: Yes, we've managed to get our hands on a beefier machine (Quad Core 3.5 GHz, 8GB RAM) for a few days. Initial testing has shown quicker results on Windows 2003, but in the same order of magnitude (ie hours). Full results from that machine will be available in the next few weeks.

Q: How many times did you run these tests?

A: Most tests have been run a few times as the techies were setting them up and performing initial loops. All the test results are from testing scenarios run by Alan. Brad was then asked to run a few of the tests again independently. He verified the baseline 2003 Server result and the first of the 2008 Server results (ie with 2.0 and SQL 2005)

The results above are based on the last and most thorough pass (by Alan). Thus, it is the actual result, not an average of repeated tests. Ideally multiple results would be better, and as time permits, we'll re-run all the tests, and provide averages.

Q: Did you perform any optimisation of the 2008 setup?

A: No, all test scenarios were conducted on freshly installed, out-of-the-box setups.

Q: Did you try optimising the Windows 2003 setup?

A: Yes, we did. The techies tried different combinations of turning on compression, increasing memory, CPU monitoring, tweaking application pools, and other memory changes. In all cases there was very minimal change in Windows 2003 performance. The results tabled above are based on the untweaked out-of-the-box installation.

Q: What version of Windows Server is the Elcom web site running on?

A: The actual live Elcom web site is still on Windows 2008 RC0. We aim to cut over to the RTM version once our SPLA license is finalised... 2008 SPLA licensing should be available this month (fingers crossed).

Q: Are you using any .NET 3.5 specific features in these scenarios?

A: No, we've made sure that the code base is exactly the same, the only change has been the framework version targeted during compile (and of course the IIS settings).

Next steps for Elcom

So, where to from here?

We'll be moving a few of our client sites over to Windows 2008 hosting in the coming weeks (assuming licensing is all sorted). A few of our staging servers are already in transition. And from April onwards we plan to move all our hosting onto Windows 2008. [We'll still be supporting clients who host on Windows 2003 of course.]

Next, we are upgrading clients to .NET 3.5.

Our next Community Manager.NET release (in mid March) will be available in both 2.0 and 3.5 versions. The 3.5 version (which we are referring to as Community Manager 2008) will be essentially the same code base, with only a few new 3.5 features used for off-line services (the new System.AddIn stuff).

Our code base will be branched into the two versions for approximately 3 months until we've completed our testing and moved all clients over to .NET 3.5. After that we will return to having the one code base (ie just targeting 3.5).

SQL Server 2008 is still too early to make plans for. Whilst we will continue testing with it (especially with CTP6 just released), we won't be moving any production systems (other than our own web site) over to it until much later in the year.

Over to you

There's our situation. I hope it is helpful (or at least of some interest).

I'm keen to answer any questions, hear any criticisms and take on board any suggestions.

Please contact me via any method on my Contact page.

Ask most people what the best thing about Open Source is, and they'll tell you one of two things:

1. It's not Microsoft, or

2. It's free

We've all heard the Cost of Ownership arguments and know that being free to use is not necessarily free to operate, but that's not really an issue for people like, um, students.

Microsoft has unveiled its DreamSpark* initiative, in which students get a stack of developer & designer tools for free. Get them hooked young.

I think this is a great idea. In fact, always have. When I was at uni (back in the dark ages - I graduated in '94 :-) the main player in student developer tools was Borland. Why? Because they were dirt cheap. They lead the way with the whole academic pricing model that is now used by Microsoft, Adobe and others. I remember buying the full, enterprise, everything, all-you-can-eat, version of Borland C++ for something like a hundred bucks (retail was in the thousands) simply because I was a student. In fact I wrote my whole thesis in it (ahhh pointers, how I miss you not...).

Everyone in my course was using Borland and we were all hooked. And remember that Software Engineering as a degree was pretty new** in those days (I commenced my degree in '89 and it had only been going for a few years prior to that I think). Anyway enough of the boring history, my point is this. Borland owned that generation of software engineer. Microsoft were quick to catch on and a few years after I finished, Microsoft Visual C++ had taken the top spot.

Microsoft's recent decision to make their tools free to developers is a simple evolution of this. 15 years ago they were competing with Borland and cheap pricing. These days they are competing with Open Source and zero pricing.

So this is not a clever move, nor even a surprising move. It is a necessary move to ensure they can still have some hold on the crucial student generation - and thus tomorrow's IT generation. It'll be interesting to see how many of these licenses are claimed, and to compare that to usage of the Express range. My guess is that students are gonna flock to this like ants to a sugar bowl.

The only bad part - it won't be available in Australia for a little while (since there is no verification system in place - as Long Zheng points out).

* btw I think DreamSpark is a dumb name.

** Note: I should clarify that Software Engineering is different to Computer Science - at least it was when & where I was going through. Software Engineering was new and came out of the Electrical Engineering faculty - and was a 6 year degree. Computer Science, which had been around for ages, was a 3 or 4 year degree (depending on electives). Interestingly, Software Engineering went down the DOS and Windows path, where as Comp Sci had a lot more Unix.

You've all heard of Amazon's Simple Storage Service by now. If not then check it out and sign up for own Web Services account.

Amazon S3 gives you access to scalable storage for 15c per GB per month, with a 10c per GB data transfer cost.

Assuming you just use the service to upload data for backup purposes you are getting high performance, scalable storage for 25c per GB per month. All charged to your existing Amazon account.

There are a bunch of utilities popping up to help with the transfer of data. One such program is Jungle Disk (cost $20). Once configured, it basically sets up a new drive mapping to your Amazon S3 storage.

Simply drag and drop files onto the drive (J drive on my machine) and it automatically copies them up to Amazon.

It can be set to do backups automatically as well (eg I have set it to copy stuff up in the early morning hours).

There are numerous other online backup services available, and some work out to be cheaper if you have very large data storage requirements (eg >20GB).

However I particularly like the simplicity of the Amazon/Jungle Disk combination. In particular I like that Michele and I both have J drive's on our machines pointing to the one S3 account. I can pull down a backup of Michele's files onto my machine if required (and vice versa).

It is also easy to share files using this method (although there are cheaper methods of achieving that requirement I must admit). But paying a few bucks a month to have the security and ease of Amazon is a small price to pay.

(Jungle Disk also offer add-on services such as Web based access, you can find out more here.)

Jon Galloway gives us the low down on this really cool application. It uses Silverlight Streaming, AJAX Toolkit and .NET 3.5 and other goodness, and describes itself as delivering YouTube-in-a-box.

(Note, you'll need Expression Encoder installed)

I really liked John Galloway's post on The Man who Knew Too Much, in which he outlines the wrong assumptions and actions we can sometimes make/take when surrounded by smart people, being too busy, etc.

However, the item that caught my attention was his link to the strategy of aspiring to be the dumbest person in the room (it's about 2/3 the way down the page in Sally's answers) - that is, surround yourself with really smart people. It gets us out of our comfort zones and challenges us to contribute to greatness.

One of my favourite expressions (and greatest irritations) is: 'striving for mediocrity', used to describe those who could achieve so much, yet are content with their less than average achievements.

If we aren't improving, then we are realistically (ie relatively) going backwards.

Here's an email our Sys Admin received in reply to a query to a vendor whose product wasn't working on our servers...

It made our decision to select a new vendor pretty easy.

Scott Guthrie has noted the hot fix fixes...

Note, it is a huge download - coming in at a whopping 2.6 MB :-)

See, it's not that hard to get fixes out.

I said yesterday that I was impressed with how intent on producing high quality software Microsoft has been of late. This is yet another example. I need to be careful or I'll start getting labelled a fanboy.