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…
I usually can count on Google to figure out what I want to search for, even if there’s typos in my search. But sometimes Google just doesn’t get it right. I’m not Brent Ozar. I can’t afford a Rolex! Do you have any searches that Google or Bing didn’t get right and made you laugh? Drop…
Instance stacking is the technique of installing multiple instances of SQL Server on the same Windows instance. For example, you might have a VM or server named SQLPROD1, and have: SQLPROD1 – default instance of SQL Server, say SQL 2016 SQLPROD1\SQL2014 – for our older apps SQLPROD1\SharePoint – because it’s supposed to be on its…
“We’d like to offload our reporting queries to a separate SQL Server.” The first costs are fairly obvious. Hardware and storage – even if you’re running it in a virtual machine, you need to account for the costs of say, 4 cores and 32GB RAM. Not only will you need storage for the databases, but…
A really odd choice I’ve talked a bit about my annoyance with hardware limits for Standard Edition here and here. If you’re a bunch of SQL-savvy developers who understand the Enterprise Edition features that are now available in 2016 SP1, great. You’re a very small minority of shops. I’m talking about places like StackOverflow and…
Starting with today’s release of SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1, Standard Edition now has a lot more of the features of Enterprise Edition. Here’s the list from Microsoft’s announcement post: Performance features – in-memory OLTP (Hekaton), in-memory columnstore, operational analytics Data warehousing features – partitioning, compression, CDC, database snapshots Some security features – Always Encrypted,…
In the classic spirit of my How to Think Like the Engine class, let’s go take a look at the StackOverflow.Users table and find all the users named Brent. There’s a DisplayName field, and I’m going to be querying that a lot in this blog post, so I’ll go ahead and create an index on…
Windows Server 2016 is now licensed by the core, but that’s not really the big problem. The bigger problem is buried in the licensing guide (PDF): “A minimum of 16 core licenses is required for each server.” “A minimum of 8 core licenses is required for each physical processor.” When most sysadmins see that, they’ll think,…
Microsoft charges $14,256 for a 2-core pack of SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition. So how much hardware can we get for $7,128? I started with one of the more common 2-socket server models, a Dell PowerEdge R730, and then optioned it with: Chassis – up to 8 2.5″ drives (because 2.5″ drives aren’t just the…
With the release date for 2016 finally announced Everyone can start gearing up to gaze upon its far shores from the 2008R2 instance they can’t or won’t upgrade for various reasons. I’m excited for a lot of the improvements and enhancements coming along, and generally hope I’m wrong about customer adoption. One annoyance with the…
Two things: SQL Server is coming to Linux, and no, this isn’t April 1st, although the meeting minutes kinda read that way. Let’s zoom back for a second: if you want to expand an existing business, you have two good options: Sell a new product to your existing customers Sell your existing product to new customers For years,…
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,…
Licensing is really complex, but as long as you know these seven rules, you can go a long way: If you query it, you have to license it. “It” means the Windows environment – all of the processor cores that Windows sees. (Things get a little weirder under virtualization.) Offloading a backup or a DBCC is…
Here’s some of the reasons companies usually virtualize their SQL Servers: Cost savings on hardware Cost savings on Windows OS licensing Cost savings on SQL Server licensing Protect against the failure of a single hardware element Leverage extended features for Disaster Recovery Automatic load balancing across multiple hosts Easier hardware replacement/migration When we perform a SQL Critical…
I’ve never been so excited to write about licensing. Licensing is hard, y’all. It changes often and it’s full of lots of little details. Microsoft puts out licensing datasheets, but they’re in a difficult spot — if they explain absolutely everything, the documents get longer and harder to understand. So they have to balance between brevity…
It’s a bummer that SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition only allows you 64GB of memory. And it’s good news that the limit goes up to 128GB of memory in SQL Server 2014. But are you getting as much memory as you can out of Standard Edition? Check out Microsoft KB 2663912: Starting with SQL Server 2012,…
If you don’t license all of your SQL Server’s CPU cores, you need to pay particular attention to your server hardware. Say you’re using an HP DL580 with four CPU sockets, each of which has a Xeon processor plugged in with 10 cores. That’s a total of 40 real cores, or 80 logical processors if you’ve enabled…
You have a sneaking suspicion that your servers aren’t all paid for, and you need to get a rough idea of how SQL Server licensing works. You’ve never bought a box of SQL Server before, and you have no idea where to get started. Microsoft Certified Master Brent Ozar will break it down into a…
Every single thing you do with a virtual SQL Server starts with one very important concern: how are you going to license it? The 3 Common Ways to License Virtual SQL Servers Developer Edition, by the guest – Developer Edition has all the power of Enterprise Edition, but it’s way cheaper – and starting with…
A frequently asked question is “How much memory does SQL Server need?” It’s difficult to figure out how much memory you should allocate to SQL Server. Sizing Memory for a New SQL Server Sizing memory for a new SQL Server application sounds like it’s going to be tricky. But there is one thing that makes…
