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?

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