04Mar 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices: Chapter 17

HDInsight
I jumped at the opportunity to write a chapter for this book, Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices, because of all the fantastic people writing and the topics that were covered. I reviewed Chapter 12 a few weeks ago and I've been meaning to get this chapter, Big Data for the SQL Server DBA, read & reviewed but I've just been sidetracked. I finally noticed it on my Trello board, weeks out of date, and decided to finally get the job done. Carlos Bossy (b|t) is a great guy and a part of my SQL Family. We run into each other all the time at SQL Saturday's and other events. I've never listened to him present before, and now, after reading his chapter in the book, I'm very sorry. I'll fix…
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03Dec 2012 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

HDInsight, Finally

Azure, HDInsight
See this: That's right. The install worked. All I had to do was get a completely clean server set up. No domain controller. Now to get my learn on. Microsoft has a web site with a number of introductory samples. I'll start there and work through them. The very first example gets me set up with some data that it builds by running a Powershell script, importdata.ps1. But I'm not going to just blindly follow along. I want to see what the heck is happening so I can start understanding this stuff. By the way, thank you Microsoft for making the samples in PowerShell and not forcing me to relearn Python or something else. That would have been frustrating. The script is really simple. It has two scenarios you can…
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29Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

HDInsight: Trying again

Misc
And I thought this would be so easy. Latest attempt. I just did an uninstall of HDInsight. Then I found all the Hadoop folders on the drive and removed them. I validated that there were no services left running or anything else that might interfere with a fresh install. Then, I rebooted the server (have you tried turning it off and on again?). After all that, I tried rerunning the HDInsight Community Preview. This time I ran it as an administrator on the system, even though I already am logged in as one. Paranoia at every step is my new approach since there have been no errors until I try to turn the silly thing on. And the install went perfectly. I can see two folders, Hadoop and HadoopFeaturePackSetup. Last…
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28Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

HDInsight: First Pass

Azure
I installed HDInsight with no errors. The install is so brain-dead, I couldn't see how there could be errors. But, I decided to fire up the service to start playing with it. That's when I hit the errors. First up, I was getting logon errors for the Hadoop service itself. I tried resolving them manually, but was digging a hole. So, I uninstalled, and reinstalled, figuring I had missed an error message somewhere along the line. After this install, I didn't get logon errors. Instead I got internal errors. Some more investigation and it appears that the service was marked for deletion. The uninstall worked, but somehow wasn't complete. Yay! So, I did another uninstall after rebooting the server. Install #4 coming up.  And we're back to logon errors. Specifically:…
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09Nov 2012 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS Summit Day 3: Dr. David Dewitt

PASS
Two quick points, I'm putting this blog together using the Surface.. ooh... and this isn't a keynote, but a spotlight session at the Summit. Still, I thought I would live blog my thoughts because I've done it for every time Dr. Dewitt has spoken at the Summit. Right off, he has a slide with a little brain character representing himself. But, we're talking PolyBase, and futures. This is basically a way to combine hadoop unstructured nosql data with structured storage within SQL Server. Mostly this is within the new Parallel Datawarehouse. But it's coming to all of SQL Server, so we need to learn this. The information ties directly back to what was presented at yesterday's keynote. HDFS is the file system. On top of that a framework for executing…
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