We’ve been chasing issues with performance across a series of applications where there are multiple cloud providers (specifically AWS and Azure) in play. The application is a fairly typical .net web-based application that does calls to Azure SQL DB and AWS RDS at various times and places. The issue we’ll see from time to time surrounds lag time between the...
Amazon RDS
Mixing Flavors of SQL Server
It’s been an interesting ride, optimizing SQL Server, figuring out best use cases for the different flavors of SQL Server that we have come to rely on, and we’re seeing those choices pay off in terms of management, performance, and cost savings. The “flavors” I’m speaking of? AWS RDS SQL Server, Azure SQL DB specifically. Our event platform is based […]
Upgrades, Tuning and SQL Server
One of the areas that is coming up more and more frequently with the ability to move from version to version of SQL Server pretty fluidly with the cloud is that of tuning and tweaking your systems as you upgrade. Before any gets concerned, yes, these things apply if you’re working with on-premises systems, and these apply if you have […]
Complexities of "It Just Works"
There is a lot of talk about technical debt – that thing where systems have been allowed to run because, well, they work. Why poke a sleeping troll, or whatever that saying is. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke. But this leads to technical decay that can be hard to quantify and hard to pull into any kind of […]
Selecting a Data Platform
The whole process of selecting the right platform and the right tools to support it is continuing to become more and more complex. It’s not just a matter of selecting a provider, but an approach to getting the job done. There are many different things to consider at different levels of this choice, and it will depend quite a lot […]
Cloud Services… and the bill for them. DBA Opportunity?
So much has been written about DBAs, the cloud and the impact cloud-based resources and services have on the role of the DBA. There’s no doubt the impact has been substantial. In many cases, however, it’s been a good thing. The mundane “noise” of managing databases has become a game of options. You have the option to have a fully-managed […]
Data is Like Evidence
When you hear about breaches, so many times it’s because someone didn’t do their job protecting their SQL Server, protecting the data, or protecting the pipes that feed and move the data around. It’s a big deal – and with your (likely) cloud environment, the model and approach to all of this is changing. Chain of custody… “that records the […]
Old Guidelines Still Apply
Back in the day… standard advice was to get that SQL Server off the Internet, public-facing access, if at all possible. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t because of application access and other issues with moving it to a private segment. But the key is to remove those sensitive layers of access to SQL Server – control the surface area […]
SQL Server RAT in the mix.
The creativity of some hackers and malicious actors is just amazing. There is a new bit of malware out there now that highlights some new approaches that I think we’ll start to see more of, and at the same time, incorporates SQL Server, which (at least since some infamous older issues) hasn’t been the specific key component of issues for […]
SQL Server instance growth, management
I was reading an interesting article in DBTA (April/May 2018, “The Headaches of Microsoft SQL Server Sprawl“) and it was clear that so many of us are facing some pretty significant challenges when it comes to managing SQL Server instances. Particularly true if you consider “SQL Server instances” to include your Azure instances and/or managed instances on Azure and AWS. […]