Donald Farmer and Julie Strauss: Inside Project Gemini

Good Information, thanks a lot; great START video. Few questions/comments:
1. Did you say Compute 1, 2...n will run its own SQL Server? If so, does that mean there are multiple databases copies?
2. You mentioned, Madison == Parallel Data Processing of Data Warehouse SQL Queries. This is true for READ or READ + WRITE?
3. Can you please share h/w configuration & the scalability matrix information you found during your testing, for us to see what numbers are we seeing in terms of performance (out of curiousity).
4. Was looking for more example on "How Parallel Processing Works" in Madison, what you spoke was Datawarehouse (not sure why ). Was expecting more pictorial examples in this Demo on "Parallel Processing stuff", looking forward to see future videos
5. You mentioned the server(s) will be in Bldg#35. Do outsiders (non-microSofties) will get a chance to see what those BIG hardware looks like (I doubt we will, still asking) on which you will show the Demo. If not, can Channel-9 please record those on video, so that we can see what it looks like.
6. How easy its going to be, to DEBUG complicated query on "Parallel Processing Nodes". Are you providing any TOOLS for debug & radiators screens, which displys the thread(s) for the query on which the SQL will run, to see which thread is getting resource bogged
7. Do we need only 64-Bit Windows OS & 64-bit SQL Server?
Very cool work you are doing there
One question: can you have multiple controllers? I image that there can be a situation when a controller is being overloaded, so can there be multiple controllers dividing queries into the same set of computing units?
Could I use joins in this subset sql? Or is this something like bigtable, couchdb and amazon simpledb? It would be interesting to hear how the two different approaches to solving the parallel data problem works if it's not the same.
Thanks Charles & Christian, this is a very helpful video. It answered a great deal of my questions.
I can't wait to see this working, so I'm very much looking forward to the next video.
Right to my questions ...
So I've got afew still to answer before I can design an Architecture ... but I have Ian Giles and Mark Anderson from UK SQL Server/Madison team coming to see me tomorrow ! C9/Microsoft listens! - I'm stoked! Thanks Guys
Good introductiory video. Not too many technical details though.
Are compute node SQL Server instances running the same code as the coordinator? Doesn't sound like they need to.
Is data auto partitioning going to be supported?
How Madison compares to now Oracle's Exadata?
What kind of storage (row oriented, column oriented) is used for compute nodes?
Coordinator still seems like a potential bottleneck, if 150 compute nodes start streaming back to the corrdinator, on a poorly scoped query there is still a good chance to food it with data. Are there any provisions for scaling out the coordinator, or it's vertical scaling for now?
Really looking forward to more videos on Madison (with a bt more details on internals ) .
We will go deeper. As the title suggests, this is an introduction.
C