Cloud Computing

On Monday 2/1, SQL Azure goes commercially live. Microsoft’s charging for service now, and that means it’s officially official. I talk to a lot of enterprise DBAs, project managers, and developers about SQL Server in the cloud. Here’s some of the questions I get asked most often. What is SQL Azure? SQL Azure is Microsoft’s…

Playing Around with SQL Azure and SSMS

November 13, 2009

The latest build of SQL Server Management Studio for SQL 2008 R2 includes built-in support for SQL Azure. The November CTP is still only a feature-complete preview, not a release candidate, so don’t go installing it willy-nilly on your production desktop. To use this, you’ll need a SQL Azure account. You can register for an…

Microsoft SQL Azure: The Flat Pack Database

October 15, 2009

Erika’s friends call her “Fancy Feast” because she only likes the best things in life. She’s got champagne tastes, but we can’t afford to buy the best of everything. I recently picked up a coffee table from Ikea, and it got me thinking about SQL Azure.

In a perfect world, I’d have on-premise SQL Server for every database. I’d use cutting-edge storage and cluster everything. But this isn’t a perfect world…

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

July 14, 2009

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

Sky Blue Screen of Death

March 16, 2009

I don’t have anything insightful to add, but Microsoft’s Azure cloud service suffered its first nearly day-long outage. I have this vision of looking up to the clouds and seeing a giant BSOD, only with lighter colors. Might be the flu medicine, though. I’ll be back in the game tomorrow or Wednesday.

Amazon Web Services Explained

January 16, 2009

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL Server

Amazon Web Services When I talk to database administrators, I hear a lot of questions like: What is Amazon S3? What is Mechanical Turk? How do these things matter to a real business? I’ve got a story I like to tell around how to use these services, but for a couple of years I’ve held…

Bad storage performance on Amazon EC2 Windows servers

November 5, 2008

This week I presented at the SSWUG Virtual Conference on how to benchmark your storage performance with Microsoft’s SQLIO utility. Last week I talked about running SQL Server in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Take those two things together, and we’ve got storage benchmarking on Amazon EC2 servers: Maximum write speed: 68 MBs/sec Maximum read…

Getting Started with Amazon EC2 SQL Server 2005

October 27, 2008

Sometimes you need an offsite database server in case something goes wrong, but you can’t afford a full-blown disaster recovery datacenter. Or maybe you’ve got some ideas that you’d like to try out with a big SQL Server 2005 box, but you don’t have the hardware sitting around idle. Or maybe you’d just like to…

Amazon EC2 Windows support now live!

October 23, 2008

You can now spin up a virtual server in Amazon’s datacenter with Windows running. Even better, you can spin up a fresh new SQL Server for around $1 per hour. Amazon Web Services Blog announcement on Windows support Amazon EC2 description with Windows and SQL Server pricing And of course, this comes on a day…

Amazon EC2 will offer Windows hosting

October 1, 2008

A lot of cool things are happening at PDC this year, and Amazon’s already showing their cards: Amazon EC2 will offer Windows hosting. That means you can turn on a brand new Windows machine – or ten – and pay by the hour according to the capacity you’re using. Less than a dollar an hour…

Google App Engine: the Amazon Web Services gets a competitor

April 8, 2008

Google Compute Engine

I’ve followed Amazon Web Services since its unveiling because I saw it as a really disruptive service that enabled startups to get off the ground for much less capital. Now AWS finally has a competitor: the new Google App Engine, described in a blog entry over at the new Google App Engine Blog. The feature…

Amazon’s new virtual computing system

August 24, 2006