Tuesday 25 August 2009

Madison news

More news on the next developments in SQL Server BI. Mentioned previously on this blog, Madison's progress is reported in the Data Platform Insider blog. One customer is quoted as having 20TB of data, and installations range from 8-20 nodes.

Exciting times next year in the world of MS BI with the releases of Gemini, Madison and Office 2010...

Gemini CTP

Not exactly news I know but the Gemini CTP (technically CTP2) is out. You have to sign up to SQL Server Connect to get it (Windows Live ID required) and join the Gemini program by clicking the link at the top of the page and filling in a short questionnaire. There's also a Gemini blog here.

Why should you be interested? Well there is a good demo - in two parts - presented by Donald Farmer on here giving an indication:





20 000 000 rows in a spreadsheet being manipulated as if it was 20 000. The hardware running it? You'll have to watch to the end of the second part...

Anyway as I say I've joined the CTP program so when I get the chance I'll be downloading it and giving it a whirl.

Wednesday 19 August 2009

VMWare networking and Windows firewall

Couple of days ago a colleague and I were trying to set up 3 virtual windows 2008 servers in a domain (on VMWare's ESX as it happens). One domain controller (DC), one web and a database. Simple enough you'd think.

So we had a virtual switch set up routing to the DC with DHCP running and the other two servers set to dynamically pick-up IP addresses. However try as we might we couldn't get them to 'see' the DC using ping etc, yet everything looked OK on the switch and the TCP/IP settings on the servers. So we scratched our heads for a while - and I left for a meeting saying 'its as though we have a loose bit of virtual CAT5...'.

When I returned my colleague had cracked it. As you may have guessed from the title of this post it was Windows firewall all along. Turning it off on all 3 servers brought the network into life. Bit of a forehead-slapping 'doh' moment...