NewsGator Social inSites interviews Glenn Berry, NewsGator's SQL Rock Star

NewsGator Social inSites (NG): Congrats on being named an SQL Rock Star! For customers not familiar with Thomas LaRock’s site, can you explain the significance?

Glenn: Thomas LaRock is a well-known SQL Server MVP who works as a Senior Database Administrator for Confio Software (which is an SQL Server tools vendor). He is also a member of the PASS Board of Directors, and a frequent blogger who is also very active on Twitter. He maintains a recommended list of high quality, active SQL Server bloggers that he updates every month. They are separated into five groups, based on his assessment of their quality and quantity of work. Being on his list is considered a pretty high honor in the overall SQL Server community. I was recently promoted, based on his rankings, to his MSDB Group.

NG: How does your Microsoft MVP status help NewsGator customers?

Glenn: I have been an SQL Server MVP since July 2007. The MVP Award has to be renewed each year, based on the quality and quantity of your contributions to the SQL Server Community, as judged by Microsoft. Having MVP status gives you much better contact and access to the SQL Server Product team. It also helps reinforce your ties to the SQL Server community, which is a great resource if you ever have problems or need technical assistance with SQL Server.

Being a well-known MVP gives you the ability to escalate issues and get a quicker response from Microsoft, which benefits our customers. I also get early access to new versions of SQL Server, such as SQL Server “Denali”, which is the next major version of SQL Server. Working with the early builds of SQL Server gives me more experience with new features that I can use to improve our product. A good example is SQL Server Data Compression, which was a new feature that was added to SQL Server 2008, and improved in SQL Server 2008 R2. NewsGator Social Sites 2010 uses this feature automatically when you are running the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server 2008 or greater (which virtually all of our customers do). SQL Server Data Compression reduces I/O capacity requirements, which can have a significant effect on performance and scalability.

NG: NewsGator runs natively on the SharePoint platform – why is this important to customers? How is it better than the often hyped “bolt-on” approach?

Glenn: Our developers have a deep understanding of SharePoint, with guidance from people like Dan Larson, who has written two books* on SharePoint development. We also create three databases that normally run on the same instance as the customer’s SharePoint databases, which we use to improve performance and support many of the special features in Social Sites 2010.

NG: You are an active blogger and speaker yourself – what are some of the trends you are seeing and hearing out in the field that customers might like to know about?

Glenn: I am seeing a lot of interest and curiosity about using solid state storage devices, whether they are enterprise level SSDs or products like Fusion-IO, to reduce I/O subsystem bottlenecks. I am also seeing a lot of people moving from older, four-socket database servers to new, two-socket database servers that use extremely fast and scalable processors, such as the Intel Xeon X5680. This allows them to get much better single-threaded performance (which is very important for OLTP workloads such as SharePoint), and save a lot of money on SQL Server processor licenses.

NG: For more technical customers what resources – either online or print – would you recommend for learning more about SQL and SharePoint?

Glenn: Well, to start, I would recommend my upcoming book “SQL Server Hardware” from Simple Talk Publishing. I also really like “Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting” from Wrox Press. I know all the authors of that book; they are some very sharp people. I would also start using Twitter to follow some of the more active and well-known people in the SQL Server community. Twitter is a great resource, where you can get real-time, world-class help by using the #sqlhelp hash tag.

NG: Thanks for your time Glenn, and congrats again on your Rock Star status!

*Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform (PRO-Developer) by Daniel Larson and *Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (Pro Developer) by Ted Pattison and Daniel Larson