SQL Server 2014 - Evaluation...

As folks are getting comfortable SQL Server 2012, In some cases I have heard that users want to bypass SQL Server 2012 and upgrade straight to SQL Server 2014 from SQL Server 2008. One of the big attractions is use of in memory technologies across the OLTP, Data warehousing and BI platforms. There not been much of improvements in SSIS and SSRS but SSAS/BI has got some new features. Please check the following link for all the features and the product itself.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/sql-server/#fbid=l3BkTG6tymf.
The image below was taken from the SQL Server 2014 Data Sheet...which talks about In memory across all workloads.

Hope one of these days I will get to install and evaluate SQL Server 2014.

Gartner 2014 Report - BI and Analytics Platforms...

The Gartner report for 2014 related to the Business Intelligence and analytics platform is out, as expected the number of vendors competing in the BI and Analytics space continues to grow. There are niche vendors continuing to enter the market space, at the same there are some vendors who have made it to the leaders quadrant. The vendors were evaluated across 17 categories which were divided into 3 main areas:

• Information Delivery
• Analysis
• Integration

 The vendors who made it to the leaders quadrant are:
Tableau,Qilk,Microsoft,SAP,SAS,IBM,Oracle,Tibco Software,MicroStrategy and Information Builders. Since i use Microsoft suite of products the most, areas of  concerns that has been listed are, Interactive visualizations, metadata management and Mobile BI support. As per the report Microsoft is trying to handle the Mobile BI space by using Power BI. Currently Microsoft BI products seemed to be most used in the Enterprise and Small business world the most. One of the challenges that Microsoft faces I feel is cross product integration, we have the traditional Microsoft BI stack on one hand, the Office/Power BI suite on the other, to add to the mix we also have Sharepoint driven BI capabilities. How do these different versions of BI products from Microsoft Co-Exist? At the same time Microsoft is depending on cloud based BI offerings to reduce complexity for smaller companies.
There were other vendors who have good mention with respect to the leader's quadrant: They are:
Tableau
TIBCO Software
Qilk
The concerns for the above three vendors were mainly in the areas of Customer Support and sales. For Qilk as per the report there were mixed opinions about whether product is enterprise ready or not.
In the report there was mention of two cloud based BI vendors:

Birst
Birst's BI platform is primarily a cloud-based offering. It includes a broad range of components, such as data integration, federation and modeling, a data warehouse with a semantic layer, reporting, dashboards, mobile BI and a recently announced interactive visualization tool.

GoodData
GoodData is a cloud BI and analytics specialist. It provides a range of front-end BI capabilities and packaged analytic applications that complement its comprehensive cloud and on-premises source data integration and cloud-based data warehouse platform.

SQL Scripts...

As a Developer, I have always loved writing scripts to automate tasks in SQL Server. They come in really Handy especially for DBA's and Developers alike. When I used to work as a DBA for a product development firm i had to create scripts as part of installation and provide utility scripts for clients. With the constant evolvement of SQL Server there are lot of areas where scripts can come in handy. Here is a blog by DBA On the Go, where in the some of the useful and quality scripts have been compiled:
http://www.dbaonthego.com/2014/03/my-favorite-free-scripts.html. I am a big fan of Ola hallengren's scripts, please check out the blog link above.

Cloud Services...

I was on a emergency trip to take care of my father, during the flight met some individuals who are offering different types of cloud based services for different types of companies. They were were upbeat about the adoption of cloud based technologies. With Microsoft Satya Nadella stating the emphasis on cloud based and mobile offerings, this is a space to watch out for. I am enclosing a link on a demo of Azure by MVP TroyHunt:
http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/03/the-worlds-greatest-azure-demo.html. He very nicely lists out the 14 different steps required to set up Azure and has provided a video as well.

Schema on Read vs Schema on Write...

There are more and more case studies/examples of Big data implementations. Big data is not suitable for all scenarios. Where Big data concepts are applicable, it is important to know the difference between:
Schema on Read and Schema on Write: The differences between the two was captured from a presentation/discussion on Big data by Oracle. Regardless of SQL Server or oracle the concept described below is very important to understand.

The main focus on the difference between the 2 is that when is the value realized faster, of course there could be debates surrounding this concept.

Power BI - Continued...

Today Microsoft announced the availability of Power BI for Office 365. Power BI recently has been gaining a lot of traction, I attended a session with SQL PASS on 24 hours of BI where in one of the lectures was on Power BI and its components. Please use the following link for More details.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerbi/default.aspx#fbid=4fJwgwe08Zn
As per Microsoft: a cloud-based business intelligence service that gives people a powerful new way to work with data in the tools they use every day, Excel and Office 365. With Excel you can now discover, analyze, and visualize data like never before to find valuable business insights. With Power BI for Office 365 you can easily deploy a cloud-based BI environment. Couple of features that I would like to mention here:

Quickly create collaborative BI sites – enable anyone to quickly create a collaborative BI site to share workbooks containing data and insights.

Keep reports up to date with scheduled data refresh.

Please visit the the link mentioned above to know more about Power BI and it s capabilities.
In order to understand the differences between Power BI and tableau: Please read the article below written by BI Expert Jen Underwood, very detailed analysis...

http://www.jenunderwood.com/2014/01/02/understanding-the-differences-microsoft-power-bi-and-tableau/

JOINS (Hash,Merge,Nested Loop)

As a developer one definitely would have encountered performance issues with queries run on SQL Server database. Queries that were working during the initial design phases start to slow down once projects are deployed to production. There could be several factors affecting the performance of a query, it is essential for one to understand the execution plans generated by the sql server optimizer. It is important to know what types of joins are being utilised by the optimizer and why. The joins referred to in this article are related to Hash, Merge and Nested Loop joins. The focus is on what happens behind the scenes when INNER JOIN/ OUTER JOIN queries are executed. In order to see the execution plan, one use the Include Execution Plan option in SSMS, once the query is completed, the Execution Plan is displayed in the results tab. Now lets look at what each of the joins mean.
MERGE JOIN: Match rows from two suitably sorted input tables exploiting their sort order.
HASH MATCH(Hash Join): Using Input row from the top input table to build a hash table, and each row from the bottom input table to probe into the Hash table, outputting all matching rows.
NESTED LOOP: For Each row in the top(outer) input, scan the bottom (inner) input , and output matching rows.
The following article might be dated, but it has a very relevant information with a test performed with different data set sizes and indexes: This article was written by Muthukkumaran kaliyamoorthy.

http://www.sqlserverblogforum.com/2011/10/merge-join-vs-hash-join-vs-nested-loop-join/

One can take the examples provided in the article and try to apply it to one's database and see the difference in execution plan. The difference in the joins chosen by the optimizer depends on the data size, indexes of each table involved in the join. Hope the referenced article helps developers to figure performance issues related to joins and enhance the queries better.