Zach Skyles Owens

As I mentioned in my post earlier I was really looking forward to the session about Chinese communication.  It totally met my expectations!  The most important thing that I got out of the session was the importance of high context communication within Chinese culture.

The speaker gave two examples which I thought explained her point very well.

Example 1
The Chinese professor may be hot and want the window opened.  Instead of asking her student to open the window she may ask the student, "Are you hot?"   Hopefully the student understands that what she was really asking in an indirect way was, "Will you please open the window?".

Example 2
An American visitor goes to a Chinese coworker’s house for dinner.  The American guest compliments what a beautiful painting that’s on the wall.  The next day the American finds the painting on her desk.  The Chinese visitor thought that the American’s compliment was a subtle request for the painting.

That’s exactly the type of critical understanding of a different culture which I think helps get along in new environments.

Has your experience in China been the same? 

I’m fascinated with the changes in economies and the role of economics and business on these changes.  I’m lucky enough to have a job which allows me to have an inside look at these changes and have the opportunity to play a part in this discussion.

Today, I’m at an internal Microsoft event related to doing business in China.  The session I’m looking forward to the most is related to the cultural aspects of working with Chinese partners.  Anytime that I have the opportunity to travel to another country I always buy the Culture Smart! travel book.  In my experience knowing the culture is the most important part of travel.

After blogging about SSDS I saw that people are wondering what Microsoft’s Cloud Storage offering is all about.  One reader asked…

Is it Windows Live Sky Drive?  Is it Astoria?

The answer is no…  It’s neither of the two above although it does have some features of each of them.

The best way to get the low-down on SSDS to watch Nigel Ellis’ presentation from MIX. 

I’d also recommend subscribing to the SSDS team blog.

The links above are great resources for starting to go deep…  Let’s see if I can sum up SSDS in an extended elevator pitch.

SSDS is Microsoft’s cloud storage offering built on top of SQL Server.  It’s a data storage service backed by an enterprise class SLA accessible via REST and SOAP APIs.  It’s currently accessible via an invitation beta program, a beta version will be broadly available mid-summer and is targeted to Go Live in H1 of ‘09.

For those who have been following Microsoft’s S+S message you may be excited to hear about SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) which was announced at the MIX08 Keynote today.

So what is this new cloud storage offering by Microsoft anyway?

• Microsoft hosted data storage service based on SQL Server
• Accessible via REST and SOAP web services APIs

It’s an exciting addition to the Microsoft line up of data storage products and services.  It’s great to finally be able to talk about it and we are really excited to see how developers use the service.

I’ll continue to blog about this as well as post some samples.

Roger and I have been delivering a demo which highlights Spatial and FILESTREAM features of SQL Server 2008.  One of the common things we’ve heard from developers is…

For years we’ve been told that large binary files should never be stored in the database…  Are you telling us to start storing these files in the database now?  If so, why?  Are we just supposed to throw this best practice out the window?

This is really a great question which has prompted some interesting discussions.  Obviously the answer is not black and white. So let’s start by looking at what has changed.

SQL Server 2008 is now a very powerful engine for storing binary files. 

• These files can be accessed through high performance Win32 streaming API’s in addition to T-SQL.
• These files are managed by SQL Server in their own file groups which can be backed up restored along with the rest of your SQL Server data.  On the flip side you aren’t required to backup and restore these file groups.
• Reading and writing these files can now be part of a database transaction.

So you might be thinking to yourself…

Sounds great!!!  Let’s start storing all of our binary data in SQL Server.

Well, there are some considerations to be made before signing up to rewrite your app to take advantage of FILESTREAM.  Here are some of the main considerations.

Do other applications need direct access to your binary files?

If you read my article about writing files to FILESTREAM you probably noticed that you have to go through SQL Server to access the data in FILESTREAM.  There is no concept of
OpenFile(”C:\Path_To_My_File\File_Name.docx”)

Does your architecture require database mirroring?

Database mirroring does not yet support FILESTREAM.

Those are just a couple of the things to think about.  I’d recommend checking out our FILESTREAM sample on CodePlex and make some decisions for yourself. 

FILESTREAM is a great technology and we are really excited to see how developers incorporate it into their applications.  Feel free to post comments here about your experience integrating FILESTREAM into your architecture.