Infrastructure at your Service
This is something that I waited for a while, in fact since SQL Server 2017 … and the news came out on Wednesday 09th September 2019. Running Non-Root SQL Server Containers is now possible either on the next version of SQL Server (2019) and it has been backported on SQL Server 2017 as well. Non-root SQL Server containers will likely be part of hidden gem of SQL Server new features, but this is definitely a…
A couple of days ago, with some fellow French data platform MVPS (@thesqlgrrrl and @Conseilit) we discussed an issue around Read-Scale availability groups and it made me think I had forgotten to share about a weird behavior I experienced with them. Basically, Read-Scale availability groups are clusterless infrastructures meaning there is no need to install an underlying cluster. Obviously, you will not benefit from resource orchestration and automatic failover, but this is obviously the…
It has already been a few months that we are testing the next version of SQL Server: SQL Server 2019. I already blogged about a previous version of SQL Server supporting R and Python. With the new version of SQL Server 2019, Java will also be integrated. The Java runtime used is Zulu Open JRE and can be tested from the CTP3.2 of SQL Server 2019 Step 1: The installation Like a lot of people,…
Few months ago I attended to the Franck Pachot session about Microservices and databases at SOUG Romandie in Lausanne on 2019 May 21th. He covered some performance challenges that can be introduced by Microservices architecture design and especially when database components come into the game with chatty applications. One year ago, I was in a situation where a customer installed some SQL Server Linux 2017 containers in a Docker infrastructure with user applications located outside…
We are entering now to the infrastructure as code world and provisioning a SQL Server infrastructure is not excluded from the equation. This is especially true when it comes the Cloud regardless we are using IaaS or PaaS. One great tool to use in such scenario is certainly terraform and I introduced it during the last PowerSaturday pre-conference named “DBA modern competencies”. Installation paradigms in the cloud differ from what we usually do on-premises either…
During the last DevOps Day in Geneva, I presented a sample of our CI implementation related to our MSSQL DMK maintenance product. It was definitely a very good experience for me and good opportunity to get feedback from DevOps community as well. During the session I explained our CI pipeline includes SQL Server containers both on AKS (K8s as managed service in Azure) and Windocks. I got questions from some of attendees who asked me…
It has been while since my last blog. Today it is about continuing with helm charts and how to upgrade / downgrade SQL Server containers to a specific cumulative update. My first write-up in my to-do list. Last year, I wrote an introduction of SQL Server containers on K8s. I remembered to face some issues when testing upgrade scenarios (probably a lack of knowledge). Since then, I have discovered helm charts and I use them…
Few days ago, a customer asks me if it is possible to move the history table to slower but cheaper storage. The question behind this is whether it is possible to create a history table on a separate filegroup and file. Few years ago, I write a serie of blogs about temporal table here. I will take the same example to try to set up a filegroup specific to a history table. In my sample,…
As encryption solution in SQL Server, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) is simple and quick to set up. That’s why this is a common encryption mechanism. TDE encrypts data with a certificate at the page level, before SQL Server writes on the disk. It is supposed to protect your environment from some scenarios, where SQL Server files (backups or data) are stolen. By default the certificate used for encryption is stored in the master database. But…
Optimizing Multi-Billion Row Tables in Tabular in 2018 I wanted to attend the session moderated by Marco Russo to see his approach of optimizing performance in Tabular model The first thing to understand is how the data is stored and organized in a Tabular model. It is of course using the xVelocity in-memory capabilities with the Vertipac column storage layout engine. It organizes the data, compressing it by column, in combination with a dictionary…
