Denis Gobo : cloud computing

A couple of reasons I won't be moving my databases to the cloud anytime soon

Denis Gobo — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:04:00 GMT

Let's beat this horse to death once again shall we, Paul Nielsen wrote about SQL in the cloud already here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/paul_nielsen/archive/2009/02/24/sql-in-the-cloud.aspx where he made the following prediction:

In five years time, hosting your own SQL data on your own servers will seem as obsolete as running your own dial-up BBS.

I am not so sure about that!

I attended the Microsoft Enterprise Developer Conference in New York City on Tuesday and Wednesday. Last year it was all about High Performance Computing, this time it was all about the cloud(I know, big surprise right?)

I am going to focus this post on SQL Server Data Services. The SSDS session was presented by David Robinson who is a senior program manager on the SQL team. As you can imagine David is the perfect person to ask all kind of questions about what you can and can't do in SSDS. If you would like to watch this session yourself then visit this link: http://entdevcon.istreamplanet.com/video.asp?v=36

Oh, and that annoying person sitting in the front row asking all those questions......yeah that's me

Here are the reasons I think some customers won’t be able to move to the cloud just yet

1) 10GB limit

This is a biggie for me since I have almost no databases that are smaller than the size limit. You can create many databases and implement some kind of sharding but you need to do this yourself. There is no support for distributed/federated views across databases. You also cannot use USE syntax. Remember all that dynamic SQL that you wrote that started with USE DatabaseName..probably not a good idea.

2) No execution plan

Okay so how do you check if your query will perform well?You can’t do a SET SHOWPLAN command either

3) Costly queries will be terminated

I might have a query at the end of the month that calculates correlations for 90000 indexes and the query runs for 5 minutes, a query like this could be terminated

4)No CLR

So you have that superfast split function coded in CLR,that won't fly in the cloud mister, you are out of luck. Spatial data is another thing that is not supported

5) No analysis or reporting services

Probably not as big of a deal but it would still mean that you now need a separate license to run SSAS or SSRS on campus

6) No DMVs,

If you use DMVs or catalog views to build logic to do certain things in SQL you will need to rethink that

I didn’t hear (and forgot to ask) about scheduling jobs or if you have access to msdb/sql agent in any form. I also don’t know if you can run SSIS packages in the cloud.

Below is a picture that shows you what is and what is not available for V1

So what do you think? Will you move to the cloud anytime soon?

SQL Server In The Cloud Vaporware Or Inevitable?

Denis Gobo — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:47:00 GMT

After Paul Nielsen post SQL in the Cloud yesterday I decided to put on my Nostradamus hat and give you my take on this.

What needs to happen before we can move to the cloud?

There are a couple of things, here is a partial list

Performance has to be good

If performance is bad then nobody will move to the cloud. Since the data is external you probably want to have a secure connection and thus you will slow things down

Security has to be implemented

Can you give user A only read access and user B read\write access. What if you don't want certain users to see the salary column?

Bulk uploading of data has to be implemented

The ability to upload a file and specify the target object to load the data into has to be implemented. We get files via ftp all the time, nobody wants to parse the files locally and insert row by row.

The ability to do merge replication with disconnected handheld devices

This is not so much an issue anymore since almost all devise these days are online but if you have some legacy junk this would be nice.

The ability to restore to a point in time

You uploaded some bad or old data and hosed everything. On a SQL box you would just do a point in time restore (if you had backups that were valid of course and the correct recovery model) and you would be done.

Alerts and Notifications

You want to know every time some product level falls below a certain threshold, someone added or modified a table etc etc.

Auditing, SOX, HIPAA, GAAP and all your other favorite acronyms

Unless this stuff is implemented no public company will move to the cloud.

Bandwidth cost has to be low

There are tons of FoxPro, Access Applications Excel sheets and in house developed applications that connect directly to SQL Server, get a ton of data and then do something with that. When this is all in your office you don't have bandwidth cost. If your data lives in the cloud this could add up.

I will give you another example, we all compress our content before it is pushed to the client from our websites right(rhetorical don't answer)? Guess what? Amazon doesn't do compression because they get paid for bandwidth, compressing would lower their revenue.

You need to have the ability to profile

There has to a way to profile and performance tune your cloud database, after all that is the most fun part of a database developer, you can’t take away instant gratification

What will go in the cloud first?

The first thing that will ascend into the clouds are your typical internet applications, this will also include RIA (or as I call them Chubby Clients) that are built on Adobe AIR, JavaFX and Silverlight. Ever heard of TweetDeck? It is a twitter client written in Adobe AIR, stuff like that is perfect because you don't care where the data is stored; you just want to call a RESTful API and get your data. Websites that don’t store (or don’t care) about sensitive information are going to store their stuff in the cloud, now we have real C2C (Cloud to Cloud) since websites live in the cloud to begin with.

What will not go in the cloud any time soon?

Any app that is directly connected to a database server and does some crazy manipulation/calculation of data, the bandwidth cost might just be too high

Departmental (Small business edition) database servers or SQL Server Express edition, this stuff is cheap enough that I can’t imagine there being an incentive to move to the cloud. Shops like this usually have one person to manage all the hardware to begin with so they would not save anything.

I am also having a hard time seeing those lovely Excel sheets that are connected to SSAS cubes connecting to the cloud instead.

We cannot really predict anything unless we have some pricing. I aslo think virtualization of databases will be mainstream sooner than the cloud, one huge box 20 SQL Servers on it...only one box to manage

I created a poll here http://forum.lessthandot.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=4736

If you want you can vote (you need to register), right now it is mostly no cloud

So what is your opinion on this, The Cloud is it vaporware or inevitable?

SQL Server Application and Multi-server Private CTP Announced

Denis Gobo — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:25:00 GMT

Microsoft is looking for participants in entities with at least 1 DBA, more than 25 PCs, and SQL Server installations across their organization. As part of SQL Server “Kilimanjaro”, they have announced baseline investments for application and multi-server management. They are recruiting customers to participate in a private CTP with SQL Server Engineering. Registration for the Private CTP will take place until December 15, 2008 and the 4-5 week Private CTP will begin in mid-January

Your SQL Server 2008 trial accounts includes:
Hyper-V Image
Reporting and Analysis Services
Integration Services
Full System Admin Rights

More details and sign up links can be fond here: http://www.sqlpass.org/hostedtrial/

See you in the cloud (or was that SkyNet) :-)

P.S. waiting for Jason Massie's comment how this is the beginning of the end for the DBA ;-)

Microsoft SQL Data Services public CTP announced

Denis Gobo — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:03:00 GMT

The Microsoft SQL Data Services public CTP has been announced.

Microsoft® SQL Data Services (SDS) offers highly scalable and Internet-facing distributed database services in the cloud for storing and processing relational queries. SDS can help you develop and provision new applications quickly with REST and SOAP based web protocols. The services are built on robust SQL Server database and Windows Server technologies, providing high availability and security.

This is all part of the azure platform, the CTP is free but you do need a Credit Card for verification purposes

Visit the SQL Data Services Dev Center

Try the SQL Data Services Public CTP

Run Microsoft Windows Server And SQL Server on Amazon EC2

Denis Gobo — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:46:00 GMT

Amazon made an annoucement today that you will be able to run Microsoft Windows Server And SQL Server on Amazon EC2.

Starting later this Fall, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. Today, you can choose from a variety of Unix-based operating systems, and soon you will be able to configure your instances to run the Windows Server operating system. In addition, you will be able to use SQL Server as another option within Amazon EC2 for running relational databases.

Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server provides an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. By choosing Amazon EC2 as the deployment environment for your Windows-based applications, you will be able to take advantage of Amazon’s proven scalability and reliability, as well as the cost-effective, pay-as-you-go pricing model offered by Amazon Web Services.

More info here: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/