The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
Notes: Questions and Topics
The Failure of IoT
The first topic of the night was a blog post by Pete Warden, asking why the Internet of Things phenomenon never got past the trough of disillusionment in Gartner-speak. Pete brings up several good points, though I spend a long time railing on one point I didn’t see from Pete: the utter lack of security. But in fairness, I’m also not sure that the utter lack of security is actually a factor in why the mass market generally rejects IoT objects, because I’m very cynical about this topic.
Anders and I also spent a bit of time covering industrial IoT, where there’s a much stronger use case. And I went half-ranty on the desire for Intranet of Things and not Internet of Things.
Goodbye, System.Data.SqlClient Package
Topic number two comes from a David Engel announcement: Microsoft is deprecating the System.Data.SqlClient package. For the most part, this shouldn’t be a big deal to switch over because Microsoft.Data.SqlClient has been around for several years and has significantly grown in capability. It did remind me of FSharp.Data.SqlClient, which needed System.Data.SqlClient back when I used it.
Improving Full-Text Index Performance
Mala wanted us to talk about a Microsoft article on improving full-text index performance. This article brought back memories, many of which were not good. For example, it reminded me that AWE was a thing. For those who are blissfully unaware, prior to SQL Server being a 64-bit installation, the x86 version was limited to 2GB of RAM. Unless, of course, you enabled the Address Windowing Extensions capability, which allowed you to use 3GB of RAM for the database engine. Given that this article prominently talks about AWE, I think it gives you an idea of how quickly advice changes around full-text indexing.
I will give the article major kudos on one point: it provides an explicit formula for “How much memory will I need for this?” Too often, the answer to that question is, “Dunno, how much you got?” And that’s not a particularly satisfying answer. In fairness, the reason for this is there are so many factors that affect memory needs, including database sizes, indexing strategy, expected query response times, other services running on the machine, etc. That makes it really hard to give a satisfying a priori answer. This article does that, at least with respect to how much memory the fdhost.exe service will require. I think it definitely falls short on amount of memory left over, especially for modern servers, but I still applaud its attempt to get to a conclusive answer.