RunAs Radio

Richard chats with former PFE Joe Sack about his work helping queries go faster in SQL Server. Joe talks about his techniques for figuring out what to fix as well as how to fix it, starting with studying wait statistics in dynamic management views - SQL Server knows what it's waiting for! From there the conversation digs into the ways that SQL Server fools itself to perform badly, including cardinality estimate issues and other problems with statistics. Joe also looks at the potential of column store indexes in SQL 2012 - still new cool stuff to come in SQL Server!

Mark Russinovich returns to the show to talk about his new book Trojan Horse and discuss the world of cyberwarfare and malware in general. After scaring the heck out of us with the potential exploitation of computing out there today, the conversation turns to solutions. Mark points out how the white listing approach of iOS and the Apple App Store has been so effective in keeping malware off iOS devices that it is being emulated everywhere, including Microsoft. Richard also pokes at Mark's role around Azure and the cloud - is that where the next generation of exploits will come?

Richard chats with Glenn Berry about SQL Server hardware. Microsoft changed the licensing of SQL Server in 2012 to per-core rather than per-socket, suddenly making SQL Server much more expensive if you've gone to lots of cores. Glenn talks about how to assess your workload to know if you need as many cores as you currently have, why you shouldn't upgrade in place and use old hardware for SQL Server 2012 and the differences between Intel and AMD CPUs in this new world. Lots of geeky hardware speak, but if you do it right, you can make your SQL hardware almost free! Glenn mentions a couple of important web sites related to SQL performance in relation to hardware, including the TPC-E stats and Geekbench to understand how your hardware performs.

Richard talks to Michael Steineke about the new clustering features of Windows 2012. Michael starts with the latest version of Network Load Balancing for clustering and goes from there - looking at how all the major products Microsoft makes, like SQL Server and Exchange, work with clustering. The conversation focuses in on the importance of the new file share clustering capabilities, combined with SMB3 to create awesome high performance shared storage with commodity equipment. Server 2012 changes everything!

Richard chats with Microsoft's Stephen Rose about Windows 8 in the enterprise. Does it make sense? Stephen talks about the specific features available in the enterprise edition of Windows 8. It's not just about tablets!

Richard chats with Microsoft Premier Field Engineer Kamal Abburi about his experiences putting together hybrid implementations of Exchange and Office 365. The conversation starts out focusing on why Exchange in the Cloud at all, and the challenges of making a full migration to Office 365. Kamal mentions some of the regulatory hurdles that some countries put in place requiring some mailboxes to remain in the country of origin. He then digs into the challenge of hybrid implementations, covering the role of ADFS in creating a single sign-on experience, challenges with security and how to do seamless migrations of mailboxes. In the end it appears that hybrid deployment is going to be the most common model used, especially going forward into the next version of Exchange! Check out Office 365 and the Office 365 Deployment Guide.

Richard talks to Victor Mushkatin from the System Center team at Microsoft about Operations Manager 2012. Victor is the former CTO of AVICode, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2010. AVICode's technology has been added to OpsMan to provide detailed instrumentation of .NET applications. The conversation explores how OpsMan 2012 can instrument web and client-based applications end to end to detect reliability and performance issues. Victor also digs into how OpsMan 2012 is a key part of Microsoft's DevOps tool chain strategy.

Richard chats with Justin Morris about the recently announced Lync 2013 Preview. The preview is available for download now, but the product itself is still several months away. Justin talks about how quickly Lync has evolved as an enterprise SIP phone technology into the concepts of presence, integrating email, instant messaging, voice/video calling and desktop sharing together.

Richard chats with Jeffrey Snover about DevOps at Microsoft. The concept of DevOps goes back to a talk that John Allspaw and Paul Hammond did at Velocity called 10 Deploys Per Day. DevOps focuses on having developers and operations working closely together to make rapid deployments possible. Jeff discusses his blog post on the subject of Windows Server 2012, PowerShell 3.0 and DevOps. DevOps is coming to the Microsoft world, are you ready?

Richard talks with Bhargav Shukla about some of the issues he encounters with Exchange 2010 out in the field. The conversation starts out with a long discussion about the impact of mobile device, especially the tendancy today to bring your own device to work. Most users have several devices now syncing with Exchange, not just one or two. This leads to a great knowledge base article on issues with Exchange Active Sync and third party devices. Bhargav then moves onto issues around mailbox size, the impact of active directory performance and load balancing. So many challenges, but only so much time - this show is chocked full of ideas on how to make Exchange perform better!