24Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

I Don’t Care

Azure
It's funny how certain sentences can both accurately reflect a situation and communicate entirely the wrong message. When thinking about cloud-based data management, things come down to a simple, if misleading, statement; I don't care. I don't care about operating systems or servers or disks. I need to have a database and it needs to be available and I need a reasonable assurance of performance. Within those parameters, I just don't care if the OS is patched or not, if the SAN is configured perfectly. I could care less if there are appropriate alerts on the internal network switches. None of that matters to me a whit. I just don't care about any of that because I'm focused on building a database and writing code and getting an app online. The infrastructure just needs to…
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17Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Azure First

Azure
Microsoft has been pretty clear about their commitment to the entire Azure infrastructure. The updates to Azure come out on a massively accelerated schedule. Because of this, they're doing lots of code on lots of things that may, one day, end up in your full blown SQL Server instance, but are currently only available in Windows Azure SQL Database. This is because of that accelerated schedule. It frees Microsoft developers up to experiment a little. I saw some evidence of it the other day. I had been working on a series of queries for the pre-conference seminar that I helped put on at TechEd (and one that I'm doing for the PASS Summit). When I write queries, I use SQL Prompt. Sorry to be plugging Red Gate products on the…
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10Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Praise and a Suggestion for AlwaysOn

Uncategorized
One of my favorite additions to SQL Server 2012 is the Availability Groups, referred to as AlwaysOn. These things are awesome. It's basically shared nothing clustering at a database-by-database level. You can set up a series of secondary machines that will enable you to failover a database in the event of an outage. This is a huge advantage in high availability and disaster recovery scenarios. We're talking serious business continuity. Further, you can set up one of those secondary machines to allow for reads, meaning, you get a reporting database that allows you to offload read queries from a transactional machine. Another giant win. But wait, it gets better. Now, with the capabilities that are coming with Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Virtual Networks you can go even further. It's…
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04Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Helping Database Administrators

Redgate Software, SQL Server
Let's be honest. Database administration is not all that tough. Set up your backups. Test them. Get consistency checks on line. Some maintenance routines for statistics and maybe for fragmentation are also helpful. Set up security. In most of the important ways, you're done. Sit back, monitor the whole thing and collect your paycheck. BWA-HA-HA! Yeah, well, it's a nice dream. The reality is that you're dealing with constant change that throw this simple set of maintenance monitoring tasks into the garbage. No, you've got new databases under development. Sometimes by development teams that are absolute rocket scientists and you sit at their feet learning how they did some really cool piece of code. And sometimes by development teams that more resemble crazed monkeys throwing poo at the walls to…
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03Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Using PowerShell to move files to Azure Storage

Azure, PowerShell
I was searching all over the place to try to find out how to move files into Azure Storage. Most of the examples I could track down were for API calls through C#. There were very few examples using PowerShell, and most of those were for older versions of Azure. But, the one thing I've learned about Azure, it's a fast moving target. Sure enough, in March there were new PowerShell blob cmdlets released. This is great news. I was able to get this to work: [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFrom("C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\.NET SDK\2012-10\bin\Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll") $account = [Microsoft.WindowsAzure.CloudStorageAccount]::Parse("DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=mystorage;AccountKey=mykey") $client = [Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.CloudStorageAccountStorageClientExtensions]::CreateCloudBlobClient($account) $blob = $client.GetBlockBlob('container\adw.bacpac') $blob.UploadFile("c:\bu\adw.bacpac") But let's face it, this code makes more sense and is a heck of lot easier to write: $context = New-AzureStorageContext -StorageAccountName mystorage -StorageAccountKey mykey Set-AzureStorageBlobContent -Blob "adw.bacpac" -Container…
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03Jun 2013 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Microsoft Teched 2013 Keynote

Misc
Welcome to Teched 2013 We're starting off with some type of James Bond video. Chase scene with a really cool car. Not quite French Connection, but good. OK, that was, if a little ballsy, "you'll never crack it" Jeez, how to upset people. And the car from the video drives out on stage. And that is Brad Anderson arriving. Guy7 looks like he does crossfit. "We spend our time making other people great" He's laying out the path of the future and, shock of shocks, he said SQL. Out loud. On stage. Twice. That's pretty cool. SQL Server often feels like a red-headed step child. Iain McDonald, comes out to introduce information about Windows Core. The OS covers everything from the phone to tablets to xbox to your servers. The…
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