Well, I’m still digging out from last weeks TechEd 2007 this week – I’ve followed up on all of the customers, vendors and press contacts and leads. I’ve gone through all of the twenty pounds of ‘junk’ – I mean, literature that we received in the ‘better then average’ backpack they gave out this year. And I’ve starting loading and reviewing the software that was handed out or announced this week…
Which brings me to the point of this blog. I finally had a chance to load the Orcas beta 1 code this week. The Orcas beta loads the .NET 3.0 AND 3.5 runtimes, which was a little surprising as I only expected to see the beta of 3.0. And what’s more interesting is that the 3.0 runtime is only ~ 58 meg, but the 3.5 download is ~ 166 megs! The feature for me that makes this all worthwhile is Linq.
Linq is the .NET language extension that allows you to query in-memory objects, XML objects and SQL Datasets in a type-safe way. And the reason it is of great interest to me is that our Enterprise Application Fabric has a little publicized (in my mind) feature called Fabric Accessible Memory (FAM). What FAM is all about is giving all of the workers in a fabric access to a common memory cache that is accessible from every Worker and had the same survivability characteristics (global mirrored memory) that the fabric has. What Linq brings to FAM is a pseudo SQL syntactical way of accessing a global memory cache.
Just imagine, a globally accessible in-memory cache using different data types (custom objects, XML and SQL Server data) that is relationally accessible!
I’m sure there are multiple performance advantages of off-loading some of the processing your RDBMS has by doing this, the easiest of which being taking read-only or referential data and using it out-side of an RDBMS. Use less of your big RDBMS horsepower and more of an incrementally scalable power of the fabric on commodity equipment!
I’m definitely going to put this to use in my fabric-twitter application that I’m building, but first I need to get the .NET 3.5 runtime loaded in my test fabric of Mac Minis. The only gotcha I’ve have discovered so far is that .NET 3.5 will NOT load on Windows XP SP2 Home Edition. The base .NET 3.0 runtime loads just fine on Windows XP Home SP2, but it doesn’t include Linq. Oh well – Looks like I’ll be re-loading Apple’s Bootcamp and Windows XP SP2 Pro on a couple more machines..
Until next time…
Mark
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