Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • The Minimum Upgrade Point

    These days the pace of change with SQL Server can be intimidating. Many of us work in disparate environments with multiple versions of the platform in our environment. In the distant past I’ve had people note that they often have 2 or 3 versions to support. In the last five or six years, when I’ve asked it seems that many people have 5 or 6 versions to support. That can be challenging in trying to manage your estate as a single entity and understand which scripts will run on which machines.

    Recently someone noted on twitter that they tried to convince their company to upgrade to SQL Server 2017, but apparently someone at the company wanted to stick with SQL Server 2014. I asked a question and the person responded that since Dev and QA was at the 2014 compat level, they wanted prod there.

    Pedro Lopes, from Microsoft, asked a good question: “How can I help you avert this?” I tend to agree, in that moving to 2014 now, which will fall out of mainstream support in July 2019, is silly. You’re installing a system that will be unsupported almost from the beginning. While you will get security patches for a few years, it seems short sighted to start using a version that you may want to use for 10 years.

    That got me thinking. What is the minimum upgrade point for your organization? Not the pace or the need, but if you had to pick some random instance to upgrade, where would you go? SQL Server 2017? Something sooner? Perhaps you have some requirements in your organization that limit you from moving to a very new version. I would argue that it’s important dev/test are similar to prod, but I’d also say that dev and test ought to upgrade to a recent version as well.

    I think I’d specify SQL Server 2016 SP1 as the minimum point. This changed the feature list in Standard Edition, which is what I’ve often run for systems. We run that now for SQLServerCentral, though our decision last year was a move to 2017. We probably won’t upgrade again for many years, but if we did, I think I’d be looking to get close to the most recent version.

    What would you do?

    Steve Jones
    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn.

  • Serverless

    About a year ago I kept hearing about serverless as the way to go for all new code. It seemed every conference, every cloud vendor, even many developers were discussing serverless as a technique for running small snippets of code. This technology seemed to burn very bright, but then dropped out of the media somewhat. It’s still being adopted, but seems less popular than a year ago, with containers and Kubernetes becoming more popular this year.
    Serverless computing is kind of a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) or a function-as-a-service (FaaS) architecture where you write and deploy functions on a cloud service that are called by your application as small chunks of functionality. The pricing is by the execution, with a very low cost for resources. Azure Functions cost US$0.20/million calls and US$0.000016 / GB-s. Strange metrics, but the result is a very low cost for most clients to use a functional part of a system. The key is that there are not infrastructure worries. The serverless platform provides the CPU and RAM needed to execute a function, with storage also available on the cloud provider’s platform.
    I ran across an interesting article that talks about serverless platforms on premises don’t quite make sense. The idea with serverless is that you most closely pay for what you use, not being charged for times when your code isn’t being executed. On premises, you would need some hardware running all the time that you are paying for, which is ready for when code is called to execute.
    I’d disagree slightly, especially with architectures like Azure Stack that blur the line between private and public cloud resources. With Azure Stack, you should (at some point) be able to write applications using serverless functions that execute in your data center. If you need more resources, you scale your data center up with Azure cloud resources, and pay for your usage. When the workload shrinks, you stop using cloud resources and just use your data center.
    Most of us won’t necessarily want to run an Azure Stack, so why would be use serverless on premises? To me there is one element of a cloud service I can’t control: what other people do on the platform. Cloud services are large and distributed and in use by lots of customers at a time. If I execute things in my data center, on some serverless platform, I have better control over how things work and likely more predictable performance. If my workload is well known, I also probably have lower costs.
    In many cases, we know the workloads of our databases, and we want predictable performance (however good or bad it is). Databases are potentially a good fit in the cloud, but often in a mature application, we would be better served by keeping the database on premises, especially if we’ve already invested in the hardware and other resources.
    Serverless is a very interesting idea, as is much of the cloud. It might suit your application, or it may not, but you have to think about the requirements for your situation. Knowledge of new options and technology is important for us to intelligently debate and discuss what works best for our organizations.
    Steve Jones

  • Republish: Are you a Data Scientist?

    Today I’m flying back from the UK, all day. Usually this is roughly a 20+ hour day for me to return home, so I’m not likely to do much work. You get to read a republish: Are you a Data Scientist?

  • Republish: The History of the VCS

    In London today, or actually likely still at Heathrow working in an airport hotel. Tomorrow is SQL in the City, so today you get: The History of the VCS