The spirit of Christmas is everywhere. Last meeting of ROSQL this year. I wanted bring some joy into this meeting.

I started asking Remus to speak about Service Broker. He said YES!

Next at Microsoft Romania Eli, Lore, Sebi, Ioan, Zoli and Petru took care that I have some gifts for my MVPs (most valuable posters (contributors)).
I hope that books on LINQ, Security, BI, Query Optimization and Certification will really help you guys. Thanks to Ame that helped me delivering the goods.

The next step was to prepare my presentation on Resource Governor. That was the hardest part. I borrowed the demo from Torsten Grabs from one of the most informative webcast I've seen TechNet Webcast: Data Warehousing Enhancements in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (Level 200) but the Demo did not work. For some reason the cumulative CPU percents for two separate workloads was somewhere around 140%. That was a problem. Somehow I expected this, as Torsten's demo failed too.
Different approach: as an affiliate to a Microsoft Partner company I was able to see a demo with Francois Ajenstat:
ALTER RESOURCE POOL pFast
WITH (MAX_CPU_PERCENT=80);
ALTER RESOURCE POOL pSlow
WITH (MAX_CPU_PERCENT=20);
The last source available and the most comprehensive one was the ITForum session DAT202 Introducing SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor of Boris Baryshnikov. I knew Boris from some mail exchanges in 2005 after a webcast on performance monitoring using Dynamic Management Views and Functions. So I emailed Boris again. A long conversation started and the visible results were my today's demo and Boris post: Part 1: Anatomy of SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor CPU Demo. Thanks Boris.
Finally my demo worked, and to make things funny I too the example of Jeffrey Snover and made my powerpoint full of Merlin's animations. At least the audience laughed!

Remus had a great presentation:

And at the end everyone seemed to be happy:

 

Here's the Christmas card for all our members signed by Zoli and Petru:

Zoli also wrote a blog entry here.