Comments on: Getting Started with Amazon EC2 SQL Server 2005

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:15:24 +0000

It depends on the size of your database and how critical it is. If it’s critical, it’s worth the money – but only you can decide that.

By: George

George — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:11:26 +0000

I am new to EC2 and figuring things our how to setup my servers.I am using SQL Server 2005 on windows server 2003 .

I am an ASP.NET developer and not a DBA .For backup instead of doing log shipping and storing transaction logs I am thinking to have a differnt solution which can work like Full backup.I think to have 5 snapshots of my EBS database through out the day.Snapshots older than 2 days will be deleted.In this case all snapshot will have Fullbackup for last 2 days as those are going to be exact same copy of EBS volume.

Is this going to work or its too much allocation of S3?

Waitig for your suggestions.

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:54:23 +0000

You can save it on a file sharing service like drop.io or filedropper.com and retrieve it via RDP.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:40:57 +0000

Agreed! one more question how can I upload a backup file to the server?

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:24:13 +0000

You have to put your fully qualified domain name for your instance. It’s in the Amazon control panel, and it’s around a hundred characters or more long. Also, you’ll need to open port 1433 in order to connect, and that’s not really a good idea over the internet. You’re better off remote desktopping into the EC2 server and running SSMS from there.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:07:50 +0000

Thanks for the post Brent, I don’t know if I can connect my SSMS (on my laptop) to the sql instance in the EC2 server… if so what do i have to put in the SSMS to connect????

By: Dessi Gleason

Dessi Gleason — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:55:49 +0000

Thanks Brent,
The Firefo plug-in eventually worked and I was able to get the admin password for the SQL Server instance.

Thanks again for taking the time and documenting your experience. It's much appreciated!

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:07:41 +0000

No, I haven't, but Amazon has added a new management console that may suit your needs better than the Firefox plugin. I haven't used it yet, but it's on my to-do list this week, funny enough: https://console.aws.amazon.com/

By: Dessi Gleason

Dessi Gleason — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:19:48 +0000

Hi Brent,

Thanks a lot for the comprehensive and easy to follow instructions.
I got stuck at getting the Administrator password. The certificate with the credentials (*.pem file) doesn't seem to be recognized. You mention in your article that it eventually works after couple tries. It never did for me.
Is there any workaround that you have found for that issue?

By: Rob White

Rob White — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:10:38 +0000

Hi,
I’ve been wanting to investigate Amazon Web Services for some time now, and this is by far and away the best introductory article I’ve seen. I’ve started doing some reading a couple of times before but never really got anywhere.

Got a simple Windows 2003 / SQL Server Express edition up and running, and I’m just knocked out. I’ll never need to buy a “spare PC” for server work again.

This is great technology, made accessible by a great article.

Thanks Brent.