Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

SQL Server in the Cloud article at Dr. Dobb’s Journal

Written on December 16, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication
When You Care Enough to Spend The Very Least

When You Care Enough to Spend The Very Least

Dr. Dobb’s Journal just published an article of mine about SQL Server in the cloud.  In it, I cover:

  • The full espresso-strength option for SQL in the cloud
  • The “instant coffee” version that might just meet your needs
  • Two real world use cases – one that needed espresso, and one that ended up with Nescafe

You can read the article, and then let me know what you think here.  (They don’t have discussions on articles.)

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Cloud-based database thoughts before #SQLPass

Written on October 27, 2009 by in #SQLPass, Cloud Computing, SQL Server

Next week at the PASS Summit, I’m presenting a session called “Yes, I’m Actually Using The Cloud.” I’ll be talking about what’s out there, why I use it, and why you might want to use it too.

Brendan Cournoyer of SearchSQLServer.com interviewed me recently about the topic and asked questions like:

  • For those who are relatively unfamiliar with cloud computing, what is the case for cloud-based databases? Is it all about performance?
  • Aside from questions about security, what are some other reasons why folks might be hesitant to deploy cloud databases?
  • What about other cloud database options? Relational databases in the cloud are rare. From a SQL Server perspective, how does Azure compare to the other options that are available?

You can read my answers in the interview at SearchSQLServer.

Amazon RDS: New Azure Competitor

Today, Amazon announced a new competitor to SQL Azure: Amazon Relational Database Service.  It’s got some compelling advantages:

  • It’s basically MySQL with some added goodies. If you already know and love MySQL (I don’t know it well, so I don’t love it – yet), it’s easy to love RDS.
  • Amazon handles basic management. They do patch management, backups, restores, and export performance statistics to Amazon CloudWatch for free.  To some extent, they’re providing production database administration as part of the cost.
  • It leverages Amazon’s storage for snapshots. You just tell Amazon how many days of history you want to keep, and they handle it for you without you understanding anything about recovery.
  • Coming soon: high availability with replication. You’ll be able to replicate your MySQL databases between Amazon’s different datacenters without a fancypants database administrator.

If I was a MySQL production DBA, you’d hear my eyebrows raising.  I’d be worried about my long-term job prospects.  From here, it’s a race to the bottom.  Suddenly there’s a service out there that provides some of the same functionality that production DBAs provide, except it’s available by the hour.

What’s the Cheapest Way to Solve a Problem?

How Low Can You Go?

How Low Can You Go?

If I was the project manager for an app with a MySQL back end, you’d hear my sigh of relief.  If I could move my app to Amazon RDS, suddenly performance issues have a completely different solution.  I could either pay a MySQL DBA to find the root cause, or I could simply choose a faster/stronger/better Amazon instance size.

A “small” instance is 1 core with 1.7GB of memory.

A “quadruple extra large” instance is 8 cores with 68GB of memory.

The price difference between these two is roughly $3 per hour.

How much do you think a MySQL DBA costs?  It’s gotta be more than that.  Why would you pay a DBA if you can simply ramp up hardware capacity?  Now, of course as DBAs, we know that model doesn’t scale forever.  You can still run into performance problems at the Quadruple Extra Large instance level, but project managers will gamble that their apps will still survive long enough for Amazon to introduce faster instance power.

The Best Kind of Cloud Service

This is my favorite kind of cloud service.  It’s not vendor-specific, so you can build your app with a MySQL back end without committing to using Amazon RDS.  If Amazon pulls the plug on RDS next year, no biggie – you can still run it on any hosted MySQL service.  You can’t do that with Amazon SimpleDB, which is proprietary. Even better, Amazon RDS is full-blown MySQL, not hobbled in any way.

SQL Azure falls into an odd niche, because you can develop for it without worry.  If Microsoft pulls the plug on Azure, you can still use your app with “real” SQL Servers, because Azure is just a crippled SQL Server implementation. (That’s a good thing and a bad thing.)  However, if Azure dies off, you’re stuck with moving to SQL Server, not exactly the cheapest solution around.  Microsoft offers free-for-a-while licensing with BizSpark and WebSpark, so you can at least buy time, but sooner or later you’re going to face licensing costs.

I love announcements like this because I see it as an exciting time to be a solutions provider.  Like I blogged yesterday, DBAs are always consultants, and we need to view ourselves as providing a service.  Amazon RDS, like other tools, is something that can either compete with us or be part of our toolset.  Figure out how to use it as part of your skillset, or else you risk getting displaced by it.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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PASS Session Preview: Yes, I’m Actually Using the Cloud

Written on October 19, 2009 by in #SQLPass, Cloud Computing, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

In this session at the PASS Summit in Seattle, I’ll talk about the options for SQL Server in the cloud today and how I’m using them for my projects.  I’ll talk about how to choose the right cloud-based solution for your needs, and I’ll do a live demo of working with SQL Server in the cloud.

Here’s a video preview of me walking through the first several slides in the deck:

[media id=23 width=640 height=500]

I’ll be giving this session on Thursday, November 5th at 1:00pm – 2:15pm in room 201.  This is the smallest capacity room at the summit, fitting only 128 people as opposed to 300-500, and I got a huge laugh out of that.  Tells you something about the demand for SQL Server in the cloud knowledge or my presentation skills – or both!

Update: SearchSQLServer.com published an interview with me about using SQL Server in the cloud.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Microsoft SQL Azure: The Flat Pack Database

Written on October 15, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Last weekend, Erika and I stumbled across a coffee table at Ikea that we liked much more than we’d expect for a $50 table.

The Finished Product

The Finished Product

Erika has champagne tastes; she can walk into any store and find the highest-priced item without ever seeing the price tags.  She’s just drawn to expensive stuff.  She’s had her eye on a $1,000 marble-top cocktail table (they’re not called coffee tables anymore, don’t ya know) from Room & Board for months.  Therefore, it was a complete shock when we both really liked this $50 table with exactly the same lines and shape, but a simple white veneer top instead of marble.

$950 savings?  Sold.

Granted, we won’t be passing this table down to our grandchildren, but we don’t even plan on having kids, let alone grandkids.  And this table might not last ten years, but at $50 a pop, we could buy a new one every five years for 100 years straight.  Odds are, our tastes will change over the course of the next 100 years, too.

The catch with Ikea is that the stuff is flat packed – the table comes in a flat box.  You’re responsible for hauling it through the aisles of the store, getting it home in your car, and assembling it yourself.  I’ve done this enough over the years that it doesn’t stress me out (anymore).  My tips for a successful Ikea build are:

  • Read the instructions three times – which is pretty simple, since they’re pictures, not words
  • Use an electric screwdriver to avoid exertion
  • Drink your favorite alcoholic beverage in moderation during assembly
  • Whenever you’re about to curse, stop to think about how much money you saved
  • When you’re done, don’t stand on it to test it

All of those are equally important.

If you don’t read and reread the directions, it’s very easy to end up with a desk that shakes when you type on it – and I happen to be typing on one of those at this very moment.  If you don’t use an electric screwdriver, your arms will be tired before you get halfway through, and you’ll strip out the screw heads.  If you don’t drink, you won’t be mellow enough to laugh at the pictures in the directions.  If you don’t constantly remind yourself of how much money you saved, you’ll be picking up the phone to call Crate & Barrel.

And finally, unless you bought a piece of furniture that was specifically designed for you to stand on, then it wasn’t.  Don’t stand on it to prove a point, because more often than not, you’ll prove that it wasn’t designed with standing in mind.

Ikea Table - Before

Ikea Table - Before

SQL Server is the Marble Coffee Table

When you’re building a brand-new product, company, or web site on the Microsoft stack, SQL Server Enterprise Edition is the sexy marble-top cocktail table.  That’s the one you really want, baby.  You just know all your friends will ooh and aah when you bring ‘em over for the opening night party and say, “Yeah, I built it with SQL Server.”

“But it’s so expensive!” they’ll say.

“Yeah, but my app is worth it.  SQL Server Enterprise Edition scales like there’s no tomorrow.  Built-in backup compression, partitioning, database mirroring, active/active clustering, and all that stuff those MySQL guys can only dream about.  We’re ready for the future now, baby.  Want another glass of champagne?  My venture capital guy bought us a couple dozen cases of the good stuff.”

Riiight.  Back to reality.

SQL Azure is the Flat Pack Database

Much like Ikea furniture, Microsoft SQL Azure is a cheap way to get a reasonable facsimile of the database you really want, but can’t justify buying.

There’s drawbacks:

  • Backups are not included – if you want to get your data out, get out your electric screwdriver and build it yourself
  • Scaling is not included – you have to roll your own sharding, and frankly, I don’t know anybody who does a good job of that
  • Database mirroring, partitioning, clustering, and batteries are not included
  • You can’t stand on it – don’t use this for your data warehouse or high-throughput databases, because the data goes through your internet connection

But if you can live with those drawbacks and build your own HA/DR solution – just like you dragged home your Ikea coffee table and assembled it yourself – you can save a lot of money.

Both SQL Server and Azure can – and will – coexist.  Heck, Ikea furniture happily coexists with the good stuff in my house too.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go refresh the Crate & Barrel web site to see when my dining room table and chaise lounge are going to arrive.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Weekly Links for August 14

Written on August 14, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server, Virtualization

This might be my last link post. Now that Google Reader makes it so easy to broadcast saved articles to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, etc., I’m thinking this might be redundant. If you’d miss it, leave me a comment explaining why you’d rather see these links in the blog instead of those other services. Thanks!

SQL Server Links

SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP Available – you can download it and start playing with it right now.  Disclaimer: the cool bits require Excel 2010 and an update to SharePoint, neither of which are publicly available.

Recovering a Database Without the LDF File – lots of talk in Twitter about this Denis Gobo Ted Krueger article.

Manual Administration – automate, automate, automate.  Rod Colledge explains why you can’t get off the hamster wheel until you start automating.

Use Database Snapshots During Code Deployment – Lawrence Overbey writes to take a snapshot first, then deploy your code.  When it’s all gone Pete Tong, you can roll back to the snapshot faster than you can do a restore.

Secrets of the SQL Server Consultant – Jason Massie passes on performance tuning tips.

Benchmarking – Who Needs It? – You do, and Mike Walsh shows you how to pull it off.

Chris Shaw’s Blog Quiz – I made some jokes in my response and things went swiftly downhill from there.  See answers from Grant Fritchey, Jason Massie, Tim Ford, Tom LaRock, and others.

New SQL Server Videos This Week

SQL Server Book Corner – Kevin Kline, Grant Fritchey, Ross Mistry and your humble author talk about how to pick a good IT book.

Tom LaRock on Meet the Experts – SQLRockstar gets interviewed by Christian Hasker, Quest Software marketing genius.  (Yes, he just happens to be my boss – why?)

Cloud and Virtualization Links

SQL Azure Documentation Online – you can read the docs and sign up for the CTP.  Remember, 10gb max per database…

Is Virtualization the DBA’s Friend? – Allan Hirt says not all the time.

The Junk Drawer

Learn How to Work a Crowd – Alexis Bauer deserves free drinks everywhere she goes. This five-minute how-to video is brilliant:

Google Reader Turns Up the Awesome – now you can share RSS articles straight to Twitter, Delicious or other social networking services.

16 Apps That Make Sharing Large Files a Snap – TechCrunch shows the pros and cons of each service.

Inject Yourself Into Your Content – stop writing boring crap, mmkay?  I say it over and over in private, but I don’t say it often enough here: if I wanted to read Books Online, I’d go read Books Online.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Weekly Link Recap for August 7

Written on August 7, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server, Virtualization

SQL Server Links

Kick Your Assumptions – Jimmy May explains why sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats doesn’t include information about every index, despite what Books Online says (and what I thought.)

The Importance of Regular Consistency Checks – Paul Randal reveals survey results about how often people are running DBCCs, and explain why they should be run more often.

Complimenting Your Skills and DBA Compliments – Colin Stasiuk and Jason Massie talk about the kinds of skills you should consider learning to augment your database administration abilities.

PASS is Relaunching Their Magazine – Grant Fritchey will be editing the new SQL Server Standard Magazine, and they’re looking for writers.

Is That Table Being Used? – Denis Gobo uses the DMVs to find out which tables are being queried.

Rome Wasn’t Built in 15 Minutes – Allan Hirt goes off about why good things take time and planning.

SQL Server Memory Models Part 1 – in which the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers take you to school.

Do Small Tables Need Indexes? – Simon Sabin answers with demo scripts.

New Training Videos

How to Audit Your SQL Server – Colin steps through all of the pre-2008 options, and then demos SQL Server 2008 auditing.

Troubleshooting the SQL Server Service – Denny Cherry and Trent Mera show how to troubleshoot the service when it won’t start.

Backing Up Big SharePoint & Encrypted Databases with Differentials – Backing up databases with a lot of binary data (images, documents, files) like SharePoint or fax software can be painful.  Same with encrypted data, too.  Brent Ozar and David Swanson explain how you can use differential backups to achieve compression in these normally incompressible environments.

Cloud and Virtualization Links

The Biggest Cloud Computing Pitfall – Jason Massie believes the problem isn’t security, but more like vendor lock-in.  If you code your application for proprietary cloud tools like Amazon SimpleDB, you can face lock-in, making it much tougher to change vendors.

Real World Azure with Microsoft IT – Microsoft’s doing a tour and they’re coming to a town near you!  Two sessions per day – a morning one for IT people, and an afternoon one for developers.  I’ll be at the Grand Rapids ones on 9/16.

The Junk Drawer

Linux - Finally Ready for the Desktop

XKCD Says Linux is Finally Ready for the Desktop

Seth Godin Webcast You Must Watch – Seth is a genius and a hell of a presenter, and this particular one is about why marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.  Bonus points for working in Jimmy Buffett and Parrotheads.  Funny quote: “Do you remember when tofu only came in two flavors, Plain and Extra Plain?”

How To Know if a Company Is First-Rate or Second-Rate – Jay Grieves has an awesome article here with the line, “When you find a second-rate system that the company won’t fix, you know that you’re not dealing with a first-rate company and you need to stop treating them as such.”  Brilliant.

StackOverflow Birthday – StackOverflow is one year old this week.

DFS Replication Tips – Windows Distributed File System is a really cool way to synchronize your SQL Server backups across multiple locations without lifting a finger.  Kendal Van Dyke writes about things I wish I’d have known when I started using DFS.  (I still have a borked share on my domain controller from this.)

Facebook Now 4th Largest Site in World – they surpassed Wikipedia, and now they’re only behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Get Into the Top Ten Percent – Steve Jones tells you how to get your resume onto the top of the stack.

Your Robot Tripod is Trying to Get You Fired – Sony’s new tripod moves the camera around, recognizes faces, composes images and takes pictures automatically.  If only these took SD cards, you could hook it up to an EyeFi card that automatically uploads your photos whenever you’re within WiFi range.  Leave one of these bad boys running during your next drunken shindig, and capture the moment that you’ll always regret.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Weekly Links Recap for July 31

Written on July 31, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server

Links, links, come get your hot fresh sausage-free links:

SQL Server Links

Consolidation and Virtualization Process Flow – so you’ve got too many servers, and you need to consolidate.  Tom LaRock explains with a simple decision tree diagram.

Poor (Wo)Man’s Graphing – Michelle Ufford shares a devilishly simple way to graph data in T-SQL.  MacGyver would love this.

Top 5 Reasons Your BI Project Will Fail – Rod Colledge says “I told you so” in advance.  Been there!  If you’re working in a BI project, take a minute to look at these 5 signs and ask yourself if they apply to your project.  If they do, start looking for a career exit strategy because the company will get pissed at the BI staff sooner or later.

When Will My Backup/Restore Finish? – very handy T-SQL script from Aaron Bertrand.

The Effects of SELECT DISTINCT – Joe Webb explains with scripts and diagrams.

Is Antivirus Strangling Your SQL Server? – some best practices around AV setup.  I never thought of adding exclusions for trace files – innteresting.

Hitting the Limits of Database Mirroring – I’ve heard similar anecdotal evidence to support Steve Jones’ experience too.

Quest Project Fuze Is Out – we’re making it easier to use Microsoft dev tools with an Oracle back end.

But It Worked In Development – Mike Walsh talks about why scripts work great in dev and then blow chunks in production.

New SQL MCA and MCMs – congrats to all of these gurus, especially Jimmy May (Blog – Twitter)!

SQL Server Training Videos

This week, I’m starting to include links to any new webcast archives and podcasts I’ve added lately so that you don’t have to check the Quest Webcast Archives page or the SQLServerPedia tutorials feed.

Cloud and Virtualization Links

Private Clouds and the RDBMS – Jason Massie (of Terremark, a company that’s doing cloud work) talks about why you might have your own internal enterprise cloud inside your datacenter.  The “private cloud” term is thrown around more and more by analysts.  The more comfortable your company gets with internal virtualization, the more open they’re going to be to external clouds.

Hyper-V R2 Released – boot from USB, Live Migration and more, all free.  Will it be enough to gain market share?  If you’re using SQL Server in Hyper-V in production, I’d love to hear from you.

Using SSMS with SQL Azure – how to connect to your database in the cloud.  (I haven’t tested this – I’m not using SQL Azure yet.)

Quest Software in the Cloud – Dmitry Sotnikov shares a little about what we’re up to.

The Junk Drawer

Order Up!

Order Up!

Away For A While – Jonathan Kehayias is taking a break from the SQL Server world to serve our country.  I’d like to thank him and all of the awe-inspiring individuals who leave their families, friends and coworkers to travel away to dangerous locations like Afghanistan.  My brother-in-law just got back from Iraq, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for people who serve in the Armed Forces.  Next time you think you’ve got a hard job, think about what they’re doing and then shut the hell up.

Douchebag Express (SFW) – the bad news is you only bought a one-way ticket.

10 Photography Quotes You Should Know – little words of wisdom.

Complaining Versus Negotiating – when you want something, Buck Woody explains why whining probably won’t get it.

10 Best Non-Technical Blogs – including Presentation Zen and Seth Godin.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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SQL Azure Pricing: $10 for 1GB, $100 for 10GB

Written on July 14, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server

Microsoft’s pricing for SQL Server in the cloud, SQL Azure, has been announced.  It’s free for now, but around November it’ll be:

  • $9.99 per month for 0-1GB
  • $99.99 per month up to 10GB
SQL Azure

SQL Azure

There’s currently a 10GB maximum size cap for SQL Azure.  For larger data storage needs, you’ll need to break the database into smaller sizes.

Scaling SQL Azure Applications

If you think you’re going to need 100GB in the near term, it probably makes sense to break your application up into multiple separate databases from the get-go (10 x $9.99 = $99.99 anyway) and just make really sure none of the individual databases exceed 10GB.  Ugh. I’m surprised by this strategy because Microsoft’s never been pro-sharding before, and now they’re asking database developers to make that jump.  One of the things I love about SQL Server is that it scales so well: we can start with just a single database and grow it like crazy. DBAs who like that approach will not like Azure’s 10GB-per-database limits.

I’ve worked with companies who spin up a new database for every new client, copying the same database hundreds or thousands of times, and that has some serious maintenance challenges.  Those companies will love SQL Azure’s scaling model, though; if each client has their own SQL Azure database, then it’s easy to pass the database hosting costs on to your clients.

Beep Beep, Back That Database Up

The bandwidth costs for SQL Azure are $.15 per GB of outbound bandwidth.  Assuming that you don’t compress the data before you pull it out of the cloud, that means daily backups of a 1GB database will add another $4.50 per month, and a 10GB database will add another $45/month.  Daily backups will cost about half of what your monthly service charges cost.

It’s not completely clear from the press release, but if Microsoft follows Amazon’s pricing model, bandwidth between the Microsoft cloud services will not incur a cost.  That would mean it might make sense to spin up an Windows Azure computing application for $.12 per hour, use that application to compress your SQL Azure database, and then send the compressed data off to Azure storage for backup.  That would eliminate the data in/out costs, and minimize the Azure storage costs ($.15/GB).  Database administrators would back up their SQL Azure data to Azure Storage, keep a history of backups there, and restore them to SQL Azure faster when needed.

Of course, there’s no native backup support in SQL Azure, and it’s not clear whether Windows Azure will include tools like SQL Server Integration Services.

SQL Azure Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

The cloud isn’t 100% reliable, as the CloudComputing Incidents Database attests.  The press release gives SLAs for Azure computing and storage, but not SQL Azure.  The computing SLA says:

“For compute, we guarantee that when you deploy two or more role instances in different fault and upgrade domains your Internet facing roles will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time. Additionally, we will monitor all of your individual role instances and detect within two minutes when a role instance’s process is not running and initiate corrective action.”

They’re essentially pushing the SLA back onto you: you need to make sure to spin up two web servers in two different datacenters, and only then they’ll guarantee 99.95% availability.  That’s 4.38 hours of downtime per year, 21.56 minutes of downtime per month.  Note that they didn’t distinguish between planned and unplanned downtime.

The storage SLA says:

“For storage, we guarantee that at least 99.9% of the time we will successfully process correctly formatted requests that we receive to add, update, read and delete data. We also guarantee that your storage accounts will have connectivity to our Internet gateway.”

Note that bold part, “that we receive” – that’s because the second part of the SLA guarantees that your storage accounts will have connectivity.  Nice.  The three-nines rate means 8.76 hours of downtime per year, 43.2 minutes per month.

If you’re a DBA scoffing at these costs and availabilities, make sure you have your own numbers ready before your boss asks.  Sooner or later, your boss is going to compare costs and SLAs in the cloud with your own internal costs and SLAs.  You need answers.

My Internal Costs vs SQL Azure

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation using a 2-cpu server with 8gb ram, SATA drives, Windows 2008 and 2 CPUs of SQL Server Standard at list price puts me around $15,000.  (Yes, enterprises get dramatically discounted stuff, but enterprises don’t need SQL Azure at rack price either.)

Let’s say I use this server for three years – that’s $416 per month.  That does not include:

  • Power
  • Connectivity costs (but neither does the Azure $9-$99 price, either.  Remember that bandwidth costs extra for Azure.)
  • Management (but neither does Azure, since you still have to roll some of your own utilities.  Remember that Azure doesn’t support things like Profiler.)
  • Backups (but neither does Azure, and no, Microsoft telling me “it’s backed up” doesn’t count.)
  • Clustering or geographic high availability.  I probably wouldn’t achieve three nines of uptime with this configuration, but if I wanted to go for that, I’d add a second server in another location with SQL Server’s database mirroring.

The tough part of all this is the future:

  • Will SQL Azure’s costs go down? Hardware prices always go down, so it’s interesting to try to compare long-term pricing between the two.
  • Will SQL Azure add more features? I can back up a locally hosted database easily, but backing up Azure is going to be a little tricky for now.  If I want to add filestream data or TDE, that’s a piece of cake with local databases, but not with Azure.
  • Will SQL Azure stick? If I had a dollar for every piece of technology built then Microsoft abandoned, I’d be Steve Jobs.  The nice thing about developing for SQL Azure is that it’s a subset of SQL Server anyway.  Worst case scenario, Microsoft abandons SQL Azure – you just light up your own SQL Server and deploy your app there anyway.

Learning More About SQL Azure

For more information about the charges that will be appearing on your credit card next year:

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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SQL Server and Cloud Links for the Week of 6/5/2009

Written on June 5, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server

SQL Server Links

Bacon Gumballs

Bacon Gumballs

How to generate a random number in T-SQL – it’s not as easy as you think.

But it wasn’t my job to do the backups! – Learn this lesson from Jason Strate before you learn it the hard way, like I did.  The backup guy swore our tapes were going offsite every day.  Not so much.

How to find triggers using T-SQL – list all of the triggers in a database.  Great idea for troubleshooting – before you scratch your head wondering why something’s not working the way you think, make sure there’s not a trigger behind the scenes.

SQL 2008 Database Compression whitepaper – best practices for configuring and using Enterprise Edition’s slick new feature.

Advanced SSIS interview questions – always hard to find good technical interview questions.

Get your learn on in June – Jeremiah Peschka lists upcoming free training events, plus I’ve got a bunch on my upcoming events page.  I’m workin’ my tail off this month.  As opposed to most months, where I sit by the water and drink champagne.  Sorta.

DBCC with Repair_Allow_Data_Loss really does – Gail Shaw explains that yes, you can actually cut your fingers when you use scissors.  Don’t point that tool around casually.

The simplest performance tuning tip ever – it’s really good, but I’d say it’s not the simplest because it requires building your queries right in the first place.  The really simplest one is to drop those bazillion indexes you’re not using. Had another case this week with an OLTP table with over 40 indexes, 38 of which had never been used.  Hello, McFly.

Building a SQL Server cluster for testing – Jonathan Kehayias, one of the coauthors on the book I’ve been working on, starts a series on how to build a virtual cluster to help learn SQL Server.

Your testbed needs to be as big as production – been there, done that.  “But it worked on my machine!” Denis Gobo drives the point home with example code.

Why DBAs are paranoid control freaks – Mike Walsh explains it.

Cloud and Virtualization Links

What do you wanna know about virtualization? – Ken Simmons, a member of the PASS Hypervisors, wants to know what you want to know.  We’re building content about virtualization, and we want to know what kinds of questions you’re looking to get answered.  Take a minute to head over there and give him your comments.

Backing up your Windows Home Server to Amazon S3 – PASS VP of Marketing Bill Graziano shows how to do it.  I just love Amazon Web Services – I published a video this week on datamining, and I got thousands of people watching the video in a matter of hours.  My site stayed up fine because the thick content is all cached on Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront.  Total cost to survive the Reddit effect with video on my site: around $10.  Awesome.

Junk Drawer

Ken Block is a driving deity – watch this and your mouth will hang wide open for seven minutes straight.  He’s that good. Jump to one minute into the film for the action. To see a man with a huge amount of testicular fortitude, jump to four minutes in and watch the senseless paintball violence. Think about being confident enough in somebody’s driving to stand there while this happens. Wow. I won’t even ride shotgun with some bozos, let alone stand in front of their car like that.

Microsoft updates install a Firefox extension – because, you know, it’s a good idea. What, you disagree? Try uninstalling it. Good luck with that.

From Finger to Bung – wherein Tom LaRock uses the Bing search engine to find someone and then says out loud, “I Banged him.”

Calvinball Projects – remember the Calvin and Hobbes comic series, and how they played Calvinball, a game where the rules kept changing?

Why joint ventures fail so often – when there’s not one person in the driver’s seat, don’t be surprised if you don’t end up at the right destination.  From Rob Boek’s shared items.

Jobs at StackOverflow – StackOverflow and ServerFault are adding job boards.  The thing I like about this is that the types of people who understand enough to advertise in these places are aleady a cut above typical headhunters.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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SQL Server and Cloud Links for the Week

Written on May 22, 2009 by in Cloud Computing, SQL Server

SQL Server Links

New PCI Express solid state drive benchmarked – HotHardware got their hot hands on a prototype of the upcoming OCZ Z-Drive and got “reads in excess of 500MB/sec and writes in excess of 400MB/sec”, which translates to a nice little 4-8 disk RAID array of conventional magnetic hard drives.  I really like the sounds of these things to shed TempDB load.  No word yet on price or release dates.

Failover Clustering Supported on Virtual Machines – frankly, if you weren’t doing virtualization before, this probably wasn’t what was holding you back, but it’s out anyway.

Bob Horkay after a long day

Bob Horkay after a long day

SQL Server startup problems due to affinity masking – Bob Horkay runs into problems with an active/active cluster on HP Polyserve and explains the solution.  Active/active clusters save money, but you need a good DBA. (Like Bob.)  This stuff isn’t set-it-and-forget-it.

SQLBatman is now Thomas LaRock: SQLRockstar – Tom rebranded his blog, and Phil Factor and I carried on a conversation about branding in the comments.

SQL Backup Cleanups – before you use scripts to automatically delete old bak files, Jason Massie explains why you should check the archive bit.  I’ve been bitten by this one too when my backup guys swore the tape backups were working – except they weren’t.

Drop and Recreate All Indexes – copying a lot of data between servers is made easier with Jeremiah Peschka’s script.

Are You Down with BPA? – the Best Practices Analyzer is like getting a Microsoft Risk Assessment Program (RAP) visit for free.  Speaking of RAPs…

Ken Simmons’ SQL RAP – we haven’t decided the winner yet in Michelle Ufford’s SQL RAP contest, but I can tell you Ken’s rap got a perfect 10.0 from me.

SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit – Pinal Dave points out free training materials for developers who don’t mind digging through PowerPoint and demos.

Cloud and Virtualization Links

Ten Slides from the Microsoft SDS TechEd Session – violates all kinds of rules about good presentations, but hey, it makes a good blog post.

Send Amazon your USB disks – wanna load a ton of data onto Amazon S3 for backup, like a large volume of images (no, not pr0n) or database backups, but you don’t have a fast upload connection?  Now they take eSATA and USB drives.  One-time $80 fee and $2.49 per hour, but that’s pretty fair.  I worked for a company that needed offsite backup of a ton of billing images, and they had years of archives online.  This would have been the easiest way to get the archived data to S3, and then it’d be easy to stay current using conventional uploads.

Amazon offers load balancing and monitoring for EC2 – Amazon EC2 is a cloud-based virtualization host where you can spin up new instances of SQL Server, Windows, MySQL, etc.  Now they’ve kicked it up a notch with CloudWatch, a service to monitor your instances and scale up by turning on new instances when your app’s getting overwhelmed with load.  Of course, your app still needs to handle some of the scaling – you can’t just turn on a bunch of SQL Servers and hope for the best – but they do include a load balancer service.  Interesting, but not for SQL Server users yet.

Junk Drawer

MVP Award Trophy

MVP Award Trophy

Steve Jones’ MVP prize arrived – a USB plasma ball?  Seriously?  Wow, if this is the MVP award, I’d hate to see the LVP award.  (I’m kidding, of course – he got the USB plasma ball from the Microsoft company store.  The real MVP award plasma ball is at least 8″ across.)

StackOverflow Grows Again – coder Geoff Dalgas becomes full-time employee number 3.  It’s so cool seeing this service grow and gather momentum.

Wolfram Alpha is Nothing Like Google – I agree with Aaron Alton’s explanation of why Google doesn’t have anything to fear from Wolfram Alpha.  I am so totally unimpressed by Wolfram Alpha: it’s a visually beautiful answer to a question nobody’s asking.  Congratulations – I have never searched for the temperature on the day I was born, nor am I inclined to now that it’s even easier.

Inside a Datacenter – getting a peek inside a datacenter usually requires some nasty security agreements and a ban on photography.  Watching videos like these is like geek pr0n.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
TwitterFacebookLinkedInGoogle PlusYouTube

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