Editorials

Back to the Cloud

by Ben Taylor

Featured Article(s)
Troubleshooting SQL Server 2008 performance counters problems
In this article, Alexander Chigrik explains some problems that you can have with SQL Server 2008 performance counters. He also tells how you can resolve these problems.SQL Server 2012 Release – Beginning to Understand the Changes
SQL Server 2012 brings a while series of changes to the platform, from more crystalized support for private and public cloud implementations to business intelligence enhancements and tool updates. Here’s the start of a multi-part article series (and video) that look into the changes and what they can mean for your own use of SQL Server.

Back to the Cloud
This time Microsoft is in the limelight due to the outage they experienced on February 29th. Most likely this is old news to most of you. I find it easy to point fingers at companies and say, “This should not happen!” Still, I know I make lots of mistakes myself and I expect more issues will occur before the Cloud matures to a point of true stability.

To be fair, providing cloud hosting is no easy thing. It is similar, but not the same thing, as sharing hardware in a cooperative fashion as we did years ago on single machines, or even maybe a VAX cluster. Today we have many moving pieces using different software layers, machines with failover and replication technologies that weren’t in place 2 decades ago.

So, while we readily forgive the people on the forefront building the infrastructure of the future, we definitely should not put all our trust in their success. They can fail in a number of ways that can harm your business:

  1. The platform may be deemed not profitable and deprecated…you have to re-tool
  2. The company may go out of business, or sell to a competitor who rolls the offering up into a more expensive bundle
  3. There can be unplanned outages due to software or hardware errors

At the end of the day, you are just as responsible for a disaster recovery plan in the Cloud as you would be hosting your own software.

Do you agree? Drop me a note at btaylor@sswug.org.

Cheers,

Ben

Featured White Paper(s)
Encryption & Key Management for Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Written by Townsend Security

Simplify encryption and key management on … (read more)

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Author: Ben TaylorBen is a Relational Database veteran starting in the early eighties on DEC Vax database systems such as Bloom and Harvest. He has specialized in SQL engines for more than two decades, with a primary focus on Microsoft SQL Server. Ben has worked with small and large databases for both OLAP and OLTP working on systems for many industries such as Medical (Medical Claims and Eligibility Warehouse, HMO Provider Management, Enrollment), Financial (credit card processing, mortgage, stock portfolio management), Manufacturing (Assembly Line and Product Assemblies), Sales, Auto Auctions and more.