Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Daily Coping 6 Sep 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to encourage or cheer on someone younger than you without opinions, suggestions, or teachings.

    This is hard. As a parent, I often want to offer suggestions on how things could be better. As a coach, it’s my job.

    However.

    I find that sometimes it’s just good to sit back, cheer, and watch. No opinion, nothing other than “good job” or “great”. It’s what I tell parents to do when they watch their kids play on my team.

    This is a time of year I get to do that. I usually go watch the kids that I’ll coach over the winter when they play in high school. No comments, no coaching, no “do this”, just “it’s great to see you play.”

    I’ve learned they have plenty of things they wish they’d done better. I’ll give them things in a few months, but for now it’s just cheering and clapping.

  • Daily Coping 5 Sep 2022

    I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

    Today’s tip is to have a friendly chat with someone you don’t know well.

    In general, I don’t chit chat or strike up conversations. I go through airports and on planes with headphones doing my own thing.

    However, there are times I will start a conversation. Recently I was at the gym for volleyball activities. It’s a new place for me, and I don’t know many other coaches. A lot of them are younger, and they will look at their phones when nothing is going on. Like a lot of younger people. And older people as well.

    I greeted someone and got a hi back. I could have dropped things, but I asked a couple questions, talked about plans for the day, and got them to open up a bit. While I am introverted, part of what I enjoy about coaching is time with other coaches, tackling a similar challenge. It was a nice 5 minutes chat before we went to work.

  • New Cloud Licensing Limits

    Licensing is always a complex discussion with SQL Server. Depending on the way you run it, the edition, the version, whether you’ve purchased Software Assurance, and more, you might struggle to ensure you are in compliance with Microsoft’s terms.

    This can be even more complex when you move to the cloud, as sometimes your setup could include a license, and sometimes it doesn’t. If you lift-and-shift to cloud VMs, Azure lets you bring your existing licenses with the Azure Hybrid Benefit, which is tempting for organizations that want to get out of the data center business and move their workload to the cloud.

    However, that isn’t necessarily the same for all clouds. While Amazon lists various ways you can bring your licenses to AWS, Microsoft hasn’t felt that was legal. They’ve noted in 2019 that their “cloud partners” couldn’t support workloads on non-SA licenses. I can’t quite determine if SA licenses can be used, as lots of information out there is conflicting. Microsoft’s FAQ seems to support the idea that you need dedicated hosts, not just any shared VM.

    Not all cloud providers count, however. This week Microsoft noted that some cloud providers can let you run your workload by bringing your licenses. These are smaller providers in Europe who filed complaints. Likely these providers can’t offer the scale or pricing of GCP, AWS or Alibaba, so they aren’t as big a revenue threat as these providers.

    I don’t know what I think is the right thing, as once I’ve purchased a license, why does the location or ownership of the VM count? I ought to be able to run the software within the same guidelines in Rackspace, EC2 or GCP just as I would on-premises. However, such is the strange world of software licensing.

    If you deal with licensing, I’m sorry, but also, you should note that there are rules and restrictions when you move to the cloud. That’s something I see increasingly happening in many organizations, so educate yourself so that you can make the right recommendation. And when you get ready to purchase licenses, think about how SA not only affects upgrades, but also the flexibility of migration.

    Steve Jones

  • Future Data Driven

    I was honored to speak at Future Data Driven last year. This year has a great lineup with some fantastic sessions on data related topics.

    Register today for the Sep 28 event

    This is online, so you can attend from anywhere. You can see Anna Hoffman talk about the innovations from Microsoft. Get CosmosDB tuning tips from Hasan Savran, learn about SQL Server 2022’s contained AGs from Eitan Blumin and more. Machine learning, performance, Power BI, Graph, Azure Data Factory, there’s something for most anyone working with data.

    Sadly, I won’t be there. Well, not sad for me. I’m traveling back from Venice with my wife to London to speak at a conference in-person.

    You can attend, however. Make plans today and register for the Sep 28 event