Managed Database Services, Migration, and Cost Archives - Page 2 of 2

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Cloud Hosting Costs

July 16, 2018

In our behind-the-scenes posts about building SQL ConstantCare®, I've written about how we picked serverless architecture for the application layer, and how we picked AWS Aurora for the database layer. Hosting costs were a big driving factor in those decisions - so how has that worked out?

Presented for your enjoyment, here are our total SQL ConstantCare® hosting costs (including both production and development environments) from AWS Billing Explorer for a rolling 30-day period as of when I'm writing this post:

Production DBA

How The Cloud Turns Performance Tuning Into Cost Savings

June 27, 2018

Barely Metal
In Ye Olde Olden Dayyes, companies would outline hardware budgets and refresh cycles.

Every 3-5 years, they'd lick a thumb and hold it up to the CPU fans. If they felt a soft breeze, they'd buy the same number of CPUs. If they felt a hard breeze, they'd buy a few more. This made the hardware buy more expensive, and of course drove up licensing costs.

Building SQL ConstantCare®: The Database

April 16, 2018

I bet, dear reader, that this is the post you've been really curious about in my behind-the-scenes posts. Back in the post about the data we collect, you may remember that our initial goal was to analyze high-priority issues like missing backups or corruption check, priority boost on, offline NUMA nodes, etc. To do that,…

Production DBA

How to Restore a SQL Server Database into Azure SQL DB Managed Instances Redux

March 16, 2018

Anything Brent Can Do
There's some things you can do with Managed Instances, and some ways you can look at data that you can't do elsewhere.

For instance, you have the ability to start an restore ASYNC -- that means if your session drops, the restore will continue headlessly in the background.

Production DBA

Migrating from SQL Server to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Aurora

November 11, 2016

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…

When Should You Hire a Consultant for Amazon RDS?

April 26, 2016

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:

Production DBA

Cloud Alternatives to Microsoft SQL Server

April 16, 2013

When people say "cloud", they're simplifying a lot of different solutions into a single catchphrase. Let's break out the different options and compare them.
1. SQL Server in Amazon EC2 and Azure VMs
Amazon EC2 is a virtualization platform. Amazon buys servers, installs their secret sauce software, and rents you Windows virtual machines by the hour. Microsoft offers a similar product, Windows Azure Virtual Machines, that just went officially live.

Long live the DBA

August 1, 2008

Jason Massie (aka StatisticsIO.com) wrote a blog post this week called The Death of the DBA. He talks about why the coming cloud computing craze creates career chaos. I have the exact opposite opinion: I can't wait for databases to move toward the cloud because it makes database administrators even more vital. Reason #1: Cloud…