RunAs Radio

What burning questions do you have about SQL Server? Richard moderates a panel discussion with Paul Randal, Kim Tripp and Brent Ozar and a host of other folks at the SQL Intersection conference in Scottsdale Arizona. Taking questions from the audience, which are sometimes answered by other audience members (who happened to be speakers and/or Microsoft employees), the conversation ranges over SQL 2016, indexing, high availability, federation, data types, query governors and more!

PAL is growing up! After a few months of rest from publishing his book Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide, Richard talks to creator Clint Huffman about the latest update to PAL - Performance Analysis of Logs. PAL helps you sort out PerfMon to understand your performance problems in all sorts of Microsoft products. Clint has added a new auto-detect feature to check through your perfmon log file and know what profiles from PAL to pull in. And the latest features is the PAL Collector tool, which will analyze your machine and auto-configure PAL for data collection - and you can set it up to start on boot!

Rights Management in the Cloud? Richard talks to Morgan Simonsen about Azure Rights Management. Azure RMS works with Office 2010-13 and a variety of other applications to provide rights like read-only, modifiable, even limit viewing times - as well as letting you know when secured docs are viewed. And it can work outside of your systems as well, through Azure Active Directory. For other applications, there is the general RMS service that handles text files and images at portal.aadrm.com. It doesn't work with everything (gmail for example), but it does work in the field - if you need rights management, you should check it out!

So what happened at Ignite? Stephen Rose chats with Richard about the keynotes, sessions and announcements at Ignite. One of the biggest shows Microsoft has ever done, more than 22,000 people soaked up a huge amount of knowledge over a week in Chicago. Stephen also talks about the upcoming Mobility Transformed Tour around the US in May and June 2015!

Are Public Folders evil? Peter Schmidt says no! Richard chats with Peter about Modern Public Folders that come with Exchange 2013. Treated more like regular mailboxes (only BIGGER), the public folders in Exchange 2013 are much easier for the administrator to handle while being essentially the same as far as the users are concerned. The migration is a bit tricky, but you can do it on-premise as well as to Office 365. Peter has a great video about migrating to 2013 public folders from NICConf. Check it out!

How do you tune your stored procedures? While visiting Kim Tripp at her home, Richard chats with her about her approach to turning stored procedures. The conversation starts out focused on query plans, which applies to all sorts of things, but stored procedures have some special foibles around parameter sets and recompilation - there are good techniques and bad! Kim also digs into session parameters. If you've ever had a stored procedure that performed great in Management Studio but sucked out in the world, there's a good chance the session configurations are different. Also listen for a quick discussion on stored procedure techniques that can help fight SQL Injection attacks!

How do you manage your SQL Servers? Richard talks to Boris Hristov about using Policy-Based Management tools in SQL Server. These tools have been in the box since SQL Server 2008, but it's amazing how many folks still don't use them - are you really RDPing into every SQL Server? Hristov talks about using the Policy-Based Management tools to sweep across all of your SQL Servers and check what various settings are at - and change them if you need to! The conversation also digs into creating a Central Management Server to have a repository of all SQL Server instances and make it easy to propagate changes. Finally, if you're ready to step up your SQL management game, take a look at the Enterprise Policy Management Framework, a CodePlex project to do detailed analysis and reporting on your entire SQL Server landscape.

So what does it take to live stream the largest sporting events in the world? Richard chats with Ian Philpot, Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft, about his work troubleshooting streaming issues for events like the Winter Olympics in Sochi, 2014 FIFA World Cup and Super Bowl XLIX. Of course it takes a team to make a project like this happen, and Phil talks about the entire service chain, from NBC's broadcast to iStreamPlanet to Azure Media Serviecs, Akamai and Adobe's Primetime Player. The conversation also turns to the Azure Media Services Explorer, a GitHub project to make it easier to integrate your software into Azure Media Services. If AMS can handle the Super Bowl, they can handle your streaming project too!

Are you looking at Chef for deploying your infrastructure yet? Steven Murawski is back to talk about the latest development in Chef, including his role as the Community Software Development Engineer. Chef integrates with DSC and PowerShell to make managing your Windows instances and everything else much simpler when you roll out applications. Steven also talks about Chef going all open source, with some paid services if you need them. You should check it out!

How fast can you analyze incoming data? Richard talks to Scott Klein about Azure Stream Analytics. Scott discusses how stream analytics is different from data warehousing, being an additional "near real time" service you can add to your application infrastructure to let you react faster to business opportunities. The conversation digs into gradual adoption of stream analytics, taking small bites into the new technology to give your applications and services new capabilities without having to go "all-in" at once. Check it out!