Last night I went along to the SQL Server User Group meeting in Microsoft's London offices in Victoria (5 minutes walk from the station) to see what it was all about. The topics for the evening were:
• SQL Server 64 bit – advantages and choices
• Cursors – good or evil

The event was held at Microsoft London in one of the auditorium and was very professionally hosted.

It started at 6pm with an update on latest SQL Server related news – including the fact that SQL Server 2008 wouldn’t start on the 29th February 2008 - oops!

The next session was about SQL Server 64 bit, and when you should choose it – this was a bit too DBA focussed for me and was quite low level. But it was well presented and the presenter, Christian Bolton, obviously knew his stuff. His summary was that the question shouldn’t be "Why should I choose 64 bit?" but "Why wouldn’t I?".

There was then a break for pizza and drinks – no beer this time but apparently there normally is. I chatted to a few people and it would appear that LINQ has divided a community - with DBAs being suspicious of the load it was going to place on their databases without, necessarily, the ability to tune it as effectively as they feel they currently do. The developers liked the idea though.

The final session was about cursors and was presented by Eric Alsop – this talk’s summary was "Nothing divides the SQL community like a cursor, so why are they still around? In this session we are going to look at how to use cursors and when they are most applicable." This was an interesting talk, furnished with plenty of examples, to indicate at which points cursors will save you processing cost over using set based logic (mainly around aggregation, periodic optimisation (whatever that is) and matching issues.

All in all a good evening, and I'm planning to attend the one in June which is billed as a SQL Server 2008 UK Usergroup London Launch event. More details are available on the UK SQL Server Community website.

Update
I asked our Madgex DBA about his opinion on the 32 bit vs 64 bit question and his response was
"I think that the speaker was right to ask 'Why wouldn’t I?'. I think that the advantages for database applications far outweigh any additional cost. Considering that 64 bit is the future (or is that the present?), I think that rather than having to justify using a 64 bit system you would need to justify using a 32 bit system. Why would you want to use outdated technology? Obviously there is no point in upgrading to a 64 bit system just for the sake of it, but if your system has outgrown the capability of the current hardware and performance is suffering, or if the hardware has come to the end of it’s life and you were going to upgrade anyway, then I think that you would need a good reason not to upgrade to a 64 bit system.

The basic advantages are:

  • Improved scalability through support of larger amounts of RAM and more processors.
  • Improved performance through the ability to properly use all the available RAM (In a 32 bit system using AWE to increase the amount of memory, SQL only use the AWE memory for caching data pages. It cannot be used for other processes such as caching execution plans, sorting, hash tables, index creation etc.)

There is a good white paper that explains the issues."