Cash Rules Most people, when they get through paying for Azure, and SQL Server Enterprise Licensing, are left with a hole in their wallet that could only be filled with something that says “Bugatti”, and has a speedometer with an infinity sign at the end. Recently, while working with a client, I found out that…
Better than nothing Yesterday it was announced that global temp tables were available in public preview for Azure. That means that unmodified versions of sp_BlitzCache (which uses a global temp table to hold a whole bunch of information) will be compatible up there. This is a nice addition for Azure, and an even nicer addition…
Staving off obsoletion Brent has recently set aside “free” time to learn about stuff up in the cloud. I only put free in quotes because we do have to do something with a cloud theme, but we can pick whatever we want. Naturally, I chose the hardest thing with the least practical use. I chose…
Brent had an idea that we should set aside a day per month where we could build things in the cloud and blog about our experiences. I was tasked with Amazon RDS for SQL Server: create an instance, configure backups and test point-in-time restores. After grabbing some coffee, I logged into the AWS console. We…
We’re trying something new at the company: Builder Day. We define a slightly-out-of-the-norm task, and then the team splits up and tackles the task on different cloud platforms, writing it up as we go. These posts aren’t going to make you an expert on the topic – they’re just meant to let you skim through…
Background: I’m working with kCura to build a Faux PaaS: something akin to Microsoft’s Azure SQL DB, but internally managed. You can catch up with what we’ve discussed so far in Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. In the last post, I talked about measuring backup and restore throughputs across different instance types, regions, storage configs, and backup locations….
Preface: data professionals, if you’re in a hurry, skip this post. Nothing in here is directly relevant to your career in the next couple of years. I found it interesting because it explains where Microsoft’s developer story is going, though. At DevIntersection/SQLIntersection today, Microsoft’s Jeffrey Snover (@jsnover) talked about Azure Stack, something data professionals haven’t…
Background: I’m working with kCura to build a Faux PaaS: something akin to Microsoft’s Azure SQL DB, but internally managed. In Part 1 of this series, I talked about why we’re building it, and today, I’ll talk about where. The database team rarely gets to pick the cloud vendor. The choice between Amazon, Google, and Microsoft is…
Listen, I can explain. Really. We had a client with a 5GB database, and they wanted it to be highly available. The data powered their web site, and that site needed to be up and running in short order even if they lost the server – or an entire data center – or a region of…
You’re a systems administrator or database administrator who wants to protect your production SQL Server. However, you don’t have a separate data center or another colo site. You’re looking for instructions on: How to copy your SQL Server databases to Google Cloud Storage How to spin up a SQL Server VM in Google Compute Engine…
You’ll notice that we’ve been blogging and writing a lot about Google here this week. I gotta tell you – it’s totally bizarre sitting in a Google Cloud Next conference session in San Francisco, watching presenters using Macs, coding with Visual Studio Code, demonstrating SQL Server. I even talked to a SQL Server DBA attendee yesterday…
You’re a database administrator, Windows admin, or developer. You might even be a marmot. You’re building your first SQL Servers in Google Compute Engine, and you’re stuck at the create instance screen. How many CPUs should you use? How much memory? How are you supposed to configure storage? Will it be fast enough, and what…
You’re a database administrator, Windows admin, or developer. You want to build a Microsoft SQL Server environment that’s highly available, and you’ve chosen to use Always On Availability Groups. In this white paper we built with Google, we’ll show you: How to build your first Availability Group in Google Compute Engine How to test your…
I’m excited to finally be able to talk about something Erik, Tara, and I have been working on for the last few months. Here in the SQL Server community, when I mention cloud, you probably think of two companies: Microsoft and Amazon. We’ve been blogging about SQL in AWS for years, and Microsoft throws a…
Richie and I attended the AWS re:Invent conference in Vegas last week. Here’s some of my favorite takeaways about Amazon Aurora, their homegrown relational database with MySQL compatibility. 1. AWS has a grudge against Larry Ellison. Andy Jassy’s keynotes made repeated jokes about Oracle’s cloud product (or lack thereof), the high cost of proprietary databases,…
I’m getting an increasing number of requests these days that say: “We’re considering migrating our application from SQL Server to a cheaper, easier-to-scale database. Can you help?” Well, kinda: why are you doing it? If you’re doing it to get easier scalability, we start by taking a step back and looking at the performance problems…
Recently, we released PasteThePlan.com, which runs on top of Amazon Web Services. PasteThePlan.com allows you to share SQL Server query plans with others. Behind the scenes, we’re using DynamoDB (a NoSQL database) for record data and S3 (a file storage service) to store text data. Since we’re a bunch of data freaks, we wanted to make sure…
So you’re hosting your SQL Server in the cloud – say Amazon EC2, Azure VM, or Google Compute Engine – and you’ve noticed that when you’re running a backup or a DBCC CHECKDB, you suffer from extreme performance problems. Queries run slow, and even worse, applications report timeout errors even just trying to connect to…
In preparation for a recent load testing engagement, we started talking about the company’s goals. The DBA said something really insightful: “We want to get to 1,000 page requests per second, which is around 5,000 batch requests per second. We’re testing with all of our caching turned off, because we want to simulate what might…
Platform-as-a-Service users (Azure SQL DB, Amazon RDS) often ask me: How can I move my data into the cloud? Can I just take a backup on-premises, and restore up in the cloud? How can I use the cloud as inexpensive disaster recovery? Once I go to PaaS, why can’t I just get a backup file with…
