Once again it’s a holiday and I’m taking the day off from writing. A short piece for the editorial, but it’s a cut down version of only some outtakes. Since July 4, I’ve ended up with more than I can use, so here are two cuts of the raw outtakes across the last two months.
In the relational databases we have all different types of data that we store. We have the basic types of integers, character data, dates and times, and more. As the RDBMS platforms have evolved, we have also added spatial, XML, and other types of data that build on these base types. By classifying them as different types, even if we are storing numbers, or characters, we can more efficiently work with these data types.
As the world changes and expands, I think we will end up with more and more data that takes advantage of different data types, and perhaps even adds more. This week, I wanted you to look forward, and predict what changes we might see in our data storage in the future.
Will we see more video files in our databases? More audio, spatial, or will plain numeric data continue to dominate the majority of the space we use in our data files? I used to think that numeric data would dominate, but the sheer sizes of some of the binary data types, along with the increasing use of these formats in applications makes me think that some type of binary data will dominate in the future.
Steve Jones
I saw a post recently where someone was asking about the restore sequence for a series of backups. The scenario was this:
What do you restore?
The short answer is that it doesn’t matter. If you use NORECOVERY (Always use NORECOVERY) and restore the logs in order, SQL Server will sort things out. If the transactions from backup 2 (the log backup from 3:05) are in the full backup, they won’t be applied twice and the system will let you know.
The same thing occurs for the second log backup. This is why SQL Server uses the Log Sequence Numbers. They ensure that SQL Server can track which transactions occurred when and in which order.
If we are wondering when the full backup is complete, or at what point during your system’s life is the full backup going to return you to, it’s easy.
It is consistent as of the time when the data reading portion of the full backup is complete. We don’t necessarily know when that is, but at that point, the full backup will copy enough log records to get consistent to that point in time. If it’s a lot of log records, it’s possible that this is quite a bit of time before the backup completes and the timestamp goes on the backup file.
It’s not a short yellow bus special cloud, at least I hope not. Amazon is introducing a cloud for the US government, designed to meet their regulatory and compliance requirements. The idea here is that there are different needs for some sensitive information that the US government deals with, or at least some departments. I think most of us recognize this might be the case, and the same cloud infrastructure that some company like SQLServerCentral needs wouldn’t be appropriate for OSHA or some other department.
Amazon introduced this US only cloud that is physically and logically accessible in the US only and adheres to some alphabet soup of regulatory requirements. It should allow more government organizations to store or process data in a cloud environment. I think this is a good move on Amazon’s part, and a potential benefit for some US agencies that might process lots of data at times, but not want the overhead of a large IT infrastructure to maintain permanently.
This is a good step in the evolution of cloud computing, and I hope that Microsoft and other vendors start to develop specialized clouds as well. There are PCI compliant hosting services, but I can imagine that there might be semi-private clouds for medical, research, or other specialized data sets, which conform to the specific security and regulatory need of that industry. At some point I can imagine that Amazon or Microsoft might have parts of their data centers partitioned into different industry verticals that provide services according to different criteria.
The cloud can provide a great place for periodic and bursty workloads for many applications and companies, but there are definitely security concerns that need to be addressed. The development of specific clouds for specialized needs seems to be a positive step in allowing more companies to take advantage of cloud computing in the future.
Steve Jones
Voice of the DBA 