Cloud Computing

Architecting with AWS is a three day training session held at the AWS offices in Seattle (classes are available in other locations). Both outsiders and AWS employees come together to learn about building scalable solutions on the AWS platform. This is a practical training program – there’s no certification behind it. The Architecting with AWS…

AlwaysOn Availability Groups in AWS Revisited

July 10, 2012

Always On Availability Groups, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

always on, availability groups, aws

If you’ve ever wanted to use the cloud for a DR site, there’s good news: as of this week you can use AlwaysOn Availability Groups and set up an asynchronous replica of your data into Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you’re already in the cloud, or if you were holding off, this means that you…

SQL Server RDS

May 9, 2012

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL Server

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a platform that offers a ton of services ranging from block storage, operating systems, to mail queues, DNS, and caching. When you say “cloud”, a lot of people think of AWS. AWS hosts a variety of businesses, large and small. Unfortunately, you still have to administer and configure your servers.…

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in AWS

April 24, 2012

Always On Availability Groups, Cloud Computing

always on, availability groups, aws

Many companies are investigating a move into cloud hosting. With the recent release of SQL Server 2012, these very same companies are also looking at a migration to SQL Server 2012 to take advantage of readable secondaries. Combining Amazon Web Services and SQL Server 2012 seems like a perfect match. Unfortunately, there are some gotchas,…

SQL AZURE LOST ITS LEASE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!

February 15, 2012

Crazy Ballmer’s Database Hut is having the fire sale of the century! SQL Azure pricing is sliced in half or more. We must be crazy, they say! Check out these discounts: SQL Azure Pricing Reductions When SQL Azure first came out with its absurd limitations (no backups, tiny database sizes), I viewed the pricing the…

SQL Server in EC2

September 13, 2011

Always On Availability Groups, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The cloud is robust and reliable. The cloud solves all of our scaling needs. The cloud makes my poop smell like roses. While all of these statements are theoretically true it takes some effort to make them true in reality, especially when a database is involved. Who Is Deploying SQL Server in EC2? A question…

SQL Azure Frequently Asked Questions

January 25, 2010

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