Cloud and Managed Database Platforms

Cloud architecture, managed databases, migrations, and cloud operating tradeoffs.

131 associated posts50 primary posts

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.

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Production DBA

The Trouble with Keys

September 25, 2012

Scaling up is hard: big hardware gets expensive fast. Scaling out is equally difficult; interesting design problems creep in to scale out solutions. One of the more troublesome issues architects face when scaling out is the issue of distributing identity. It's often advantageous for object identity to be unique and portable across all database instances…

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Production DBA

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in AWS

April 24, 2012

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,…

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Production DBA

NoSQL Basics for Database Administrators

May 26, 2010

Most SQL Server DBAs don't even like MySQL, let alone NoSQL.  They cringe when they hear people say things like, "I don't need transactions" or "The data will eventually be consistent" or "Indexes will be supported in the next version." SQL Server and Oracle people are constantly trying to out-feature each other, and the abject lack of features in the NoSQL world comes as a complete shock to both parties.

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Production DBA

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...

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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 speed: 8 MBs/sec

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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…

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