Mashed Articles

My latest post is about how maintaining MSDB database, today I would like to share with you some thoughts about maintaining Sharepoint databases.

Last week I visited our client who has been working with SharePoint (MOSS7) and started complain about performance of SQL Server. I identified long running queries as well as very good number of deadlocks that happened every hour to databases which belong to SharePoint product. However , when I recommend to add some indexes on the tables people start almost crying not to do that as they were told that SharePoint databases are self managed product and DBA should not be touched it at all. It looks to me very strange , but that was my first experience with MOSS and I decided to do some searching on internet.

I found a couple of documents (even published by MS) to read them as if Sharepoint SQL Server performance can be managed by Shrinking & Defragging the DB.
I also asked some Sharepoint people and they say that accessing the database directly, changing anything on their databases
aside from what’s provided out of the box, etc. is not supported unless you
do it thru the Sharepoint API. Hmm…. looks strange , does not?

Finally I ended up with sample script to identify very fragmented indexes and running ALTER INDEX index_name ON tablename REORGANIZE;

PS.
I could not imagine a customer being unwilling to create whatever indexes are
necessary to ensure reasonable performance of a production Sharepoint
system.

The first ever MOSSCamp was held this past Friday
(November 9th, 2007) in Chicago,
IL.  This was a devcamp style event that was focused around Windows SharePoint
Services and SharePoint 2007.

Standing Room Only

Standing Room Only

One of the highlights of MOSSCamp was the number of people that showed up to the event,
as near as we can figure we had about 110 people at one point or another during the
day.  Closely related to this highlight (actually directly proportional to it)
was the lowlight that we pushed the facilities to the edge.  It was standing
room only for the first couple hours of the event (as you can see by the photo, campers
were literally spilling out into the halls).  I appreciated the patience that
everyone showed with tight quarters.  We capped the registration at 130 campers
and wait listed 10 more folks (many more people wanted to come to the camp, but we
had to turn them away).  To answer a question that many people might be asking,
we did not plan for 110 people.  We actually thought we would get between 80-90
(we based the estimate on historical drop off figures from past events, which are
typically 25-40%).  Clearly we underestimated the interest that people had in
MOSSCamp and when we have a MOSSCamp 2008 (and there is a good chance that we will),
we will adjust the registration numbers and / or get a bigger room.

The camp organizers did all that we could to ease the congestion.  I for one
gave up my seat at the event, and even exited the main room (I hung out in the kitchen
area and talked with campers).  Many of the camp organizers also skipped lunch
so that we could make sure everyone got a shot at the pizza (thankfully everyone did
get at least one plate of pizza).  The office manager at Clarity ordered up dozens
of cookies for an afternoon snack (the pizza went so fast that nobody was able to
get seconds).  The guys at K2 stepped up big
for us by having an unplanned breakout session during lunch so that we could relieve
some of the congestion in the main room and even ran that session twice (thanks guys).

My Favorite Parts of the Camp

Airing
of Grievances

I have to say that the SharePoint airing of grievances was one of the best
parts of the camp.  We gave the campers about 15 minutes to stand up and say
things they don’t like about SharePoint or to raise issues that they
have had when using the platform.  It was meant to be a fun activity, but was
also an opportunity for people to connect.  We had several people bring up issues
that other people in the camp had either solved or had some expertise around the problem
so that they were able to help each other.  Here was the grievances that were
aired during the session:

The other thing that I enjoyed was talking to the campers on how they were using SharePoint. 
I met a gentleman from a large company that was telling me about their SharePoint
implementation and he mentioned that they had “200,000 users on their implementation”. 
I said “Oh, you have an Internet facing implementation”.  He said “No, we have
that many employees and they are all on SharePoint”, he then showed me some very impressive
architectural diagrams on the implementation (jaw dropping).  I also met a guy
who told me that he is “an open source guy”, but SharePoint is compelling enough that
his consulting company is starting to focus on it.

Don’t call it a barcamp

Kevin
Marshall

MOSSCamp was structured as an unconference,
but the organizers made it clear that that we should not draw any parallels to barcamp. 
Barcamps are user generated conferences that cover a broad variety of topics (I was
in a gene splicing conversation at a barcamp), but in general the barcamps are focused
on Open Source technologies.  Because SharePoint is a commercial product we wanted
to make sure that we did not say “it is like a barcamp”.  We also made sure that
the camp Wiki was not hosted on http://barcamp.org. 
This was also a good chance to show how you can host a wiki on WSS.

There was some trepidation at first with the unconference style of the event. 
It took a few minutes for the campers to get into the groove of participating in the
event.  By the end of the day, people were just hanging out in various parts
of the Clarity office learning and sharing with each other.

Technorati
Tags: mosscamp , SharePoint , WSS , devcamp

I was interested to read about Angela’s experience trying to secure a briefing from Oracle on its collaboration related offerings and activities. As Angela pointed out, the ‘Big O’ was the only large vendor that ‘should’ have a story in this space that declined to tell her what it was up to.

When I later commented on this (with a link to the above) via Twitter, someone else came back to me to say that they too had been having trouble getting Oracle to open up in this area.

I have to say that this doesn’t surprise me. It must be quite challenging for Oracle at the moment trying to figure out how to position in this space. The Oracle Collaboration Suite was launched a few years ago supposedly to save the world from flaky Microsoft Exchange installations and pretty much fell flat. Oracle believed its own rhetoric about the world hating Microsoft, so looked silly to most people when it aggressively launched an initiative that would only work if customers ditched their existing Microsoft messaging infrastructure, which was never going to happen.

In addition to some of the things Angela mentioned, we have also seen the portal wars in which Oracle has consistently been on the back foot, and lately, the march of Microsoft SharePoint and a range of collaboration and unified communications offerings from IBM under the Lotus and WebSphere brands that are largely messaging system agnostic.

Then most recently, we have seen the BEA collaboration offerings thrown into the mix, which before the acquisition, were beginning to look pretty good. BEA had a very sound grasp of the heterogeneous world in which customers live and was taking a very mature view of social media in the enterprise, for example. And, of course, it wasn’t encumbered by competitive obsession, which, as an aside, is arguably one of the biggest obstacles to Oracle being accepted as a truly strategic partner in many major accounts. Telling CIOs and business executives that they have been stupid over the years to waste their money on SAP, Microsoft and IBM, for example, is not the best way to win friends in high places. While competition is good, destructive messaging generally only appeals to junior level activists. It is a huge turn-off in senior management circles.

Coming back to the original question, we should probably continue to expect Oracle to be tight-lipped on not just collaboration, but middleware strategy in general for a little while yet. I have personally been told on a couple of occasions to refer to the ‘official line on oracle.com’ when looking for clarity on open questions that we hear from Oracle’s customers (old or newly acquired). Irritating though this might be, and frustrating though it is to be fobbed off with ‘Mom and Apple Pie’ type feel-good policy statements, the truth is that there is little else Oracle can do until it gets its act together properly.

And to be fair, given some of the confusion than came about as a result of articulating nice sounding stories around work-in-progress plans associated its CRM and ERP acquisitions in the past (that later had to be ‘adjusted’), it is probably better for us to hang on until Oracle really has worked out what it is trying to do in collaboration as it has in the enterprise application space.

Oracle is undoubtedly already aware that needs to be careful that the collaboration and closely related unified communications markets do not slip away from it, and will be doing what it can to make sure it doesn’t get left behind again. In the meantime, it goes without saying that customers should challenge the company hard before making major commitments to it in these areas.