Product has been added to your cart.

Cloud Computing

Brent Ozar reading

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 3: What the Ideal Engineering Team Looks Like

Last Updated June 8, 2017

Architecture, kCura Relativity, Microsoft Azure

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.…

#DevIntersection Keynote Notes: Jeffrey Snover on Azure Stack

Last Updated May 22, 2017

Microsoft Azure

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…

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 2: Choosing and Testing a Cloud Vendor

Last Updated June 8, 2017

Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure

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…

Confession: I recommended that a 5GB database get split up.

Last Updated April 5, 2017

Licensing, Microsoft Azure, SQL Server

Listen, I can explain. Really. Photo by Toa Heftiba 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 –…

New White Paper: How to Build a SQL Server Disaster Recovery Plan with Google Compute Engine

Last Updated March 17, 2017

Google Compute Engine, High Availability, Log Shipping, Processes and Practices

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. Learn about what we call Log Shipping 2.0 You’re looking for instructions on: How to copy your SQL Server databases to Google Cloud Storage How to spin up…

Announcing Google Managed PostgreSQL (and why SQL Server DBAs should care)

Last Updated March 9, 2017

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…

New White Paper: SQL Server Performance Tuning in Google Compute Engine

Last Updated March 17, 2017

Google Compute Engine, Hardware, Wait Stats

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…

New White Paper: How to Build an Always On Availability Group in Google Compute Engine

Last Updated March 17, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, Google Compute Engine, SQL Server

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. Our newest white paper – download In this white paper we built with Google, we’ll show you: How to build your first Availability Group in Google…

Always On Availability Groups Now Supported in Google Compute Engine

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, Cloud Computing, Google Compute Engine

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…

7 Things I Learned About Aurora at AWS re:Invent 2016

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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,…

Migrating from SQL Server to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Aurora

Last Updated November 11, 2016

Cloud Computing, SQL Server

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…

Richie Rump

Lessons Learned From Working in the Clouds

Last Updated October 29, 2016

Architecture, Cloud Computing, PasteThePlan.com

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…

SQL Server Timeouts During Backups and CHECKDB

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Backup and Recovery, CHECKDB and Corruption, Cloud Computing

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…

Are You Load Testing for Best Case Scenario, or Worst Case?

Last Updated February 14, 2017

Cloud Computing, Load Testing, SQL Server

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…

HOLY COW. Amazon RDS SQL Server Just Changed Everything.

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, SQL Server

Platform-as-a-Service users (Azure SQL DB, Amazon RDS) often ask me: OMG 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…

When Should You Hire a Consultant for Amazon RDS?

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL Server

Powered By Somebody Else’s Database on Somebody Else’s Computer You’re hosting your SQL Server databases in Amazon RDS, and performance has been getting slower over time. You’re not sure if it’s storage IOPs, instance size, SQL Server configuration, queries, or indexes. What’s the easiest way to find out? Ask a few questions: Are you using…

Breaking News, Literally: SQL CLR Support Removed from Azure SQL DB

Last Updated September 21, 2017

Breaking News, Microsoft Azure

In the on-premises, boxed-product version of SQL Server, you can build your own CLR assemblies and call them from your T-SQL code. For years, this feature was missing from Azure SQL DB – Microsoft’s platform-as-a-service database offering – and users voted that they wanted it. In December 2014, Microsoft brought SQL CLR code to Azure SQL…

Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts: Much Cheaper SQL Server Licensing

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Licensing, SQL Server

When you build SQL Servers in your data center, and you license the host with Enterprise Edition, you get the ability to run as many virtual SQL Servers as you want on that hardware. In the cloud, though, you haven’t had that luxury. In the past, with Azure VMs and Amazon Web Services’ EC2 VMs,…

Enabling Query Store in Azure SQL Database

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Execution Plans, Microsoft Azure, Query Store (QDS)

Enter Query Store Query Store, in short, is a way to track query performance over time. In Microsoft’s words, “The feature automatically captures a history of queries, plans, and runtime statistics, and retains these for your review”. It’s like sys.dm_exec_query_stats but it persists across reboots! And it has execution plans! The Query Store is a…

When Did My Azure SQL Database Server Restart?

Last Updated April 8, 2020

Microsoft Azure, SQL Server, Wait Stats

In Azure SQL Database, no one can hear you scream query common system objects that tell you when a restart happened. You don’t get the access you need to sys.dm_os_sys_info, sys.dm_exec_sessions, sys.traces, or sys.databases. The closest I’ve been able to get is to query sys.dm_os_wait_stats for several common wait types that seem to correspond with…