Off to SQL Saturday Salt Lake City … on Friday

Posted on April 2, 2024 by way0utwest

I’m off on Thursday for Salt Lake City and a SQL Saturday on Friday. SQL Saturday Salt Lake City 2024 is happening, and I’m glad I get to go. I was looking forward to this last year, but it got postponed with venue issues. This year, the timing worked well since I am coaching Sat/Sun/Mon already, so this was an easy trip for me.

I’ll be presenting my Architecting Zero Downtime Deployments session, looking at splitting up deployments and coordinating with feature flags in your application.

The schedule has some great sessions. A mix of SQL Server, PostgreSQL, design/modeling, and more.

If you’re in/near/willing to go to Salt Lake City, come join me Friday, Apr 5. You can register here.

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CosmosDB APIs Inside SQL Server 2024

Posted on April 1, 2024 by way0utwest

CosmosDB has been a great data platform in the Azure cloud that helps companies deal with disparate types of data. The CosmosDB APIs include those for MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and Gremlin. These wire-level protocols let you work in a way that is compatible with those systems for storing data.

That’s coming to SQL Server.

For the last few years the engineers at Microsoft have been working to separate query processing from storage, and they’ve used this to build products like Hyperscale. That work is being added to SQL Server 2024, so that you’ll be able to add a separate storage engine that doesn’t use the same RDBMS/extent/page structure, but instead is optimized to let you store documents, JSON, and other structures. In addition, there will be new query processors that can run queries from your MongoDB, Cassandra, and Gremlin graph clients.

Like CosmosDB, however, you can’t have relational data and say, MongoDB data in the same database. You’ll need a separate database, and at least initially, you won’t be able to make cross-database queries. However, you will be able to store your relational and NoSQL data inside the same instance. This will make life easier for developers, who will be able to use one server for all their data.

Of course, this is an April Fools joke and there are no NoSQL enhancements coming to SQL Server. Not for now. I’m not even sure if SQL Server 2024 is a thing.

Hopefully, you’re dreaming and smiling. Maybe the engineers at Microsoft are as well.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

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Database Mirroring is Back in Azure SQL Database

Posted on March 30, 2024 by way0utwest

Database mirroring was a cool feature in SQL Server 2005. I guess it’s still a feature, though it’s listed as deprecated in the documentation. There is still a mirroring dialog in the SSMS database properties dialog in more recent versions of SQL Server, but I don’t know if there is a good reason to use mirroring over Availability Groups.

That’s why I was surprised to see a public preview announcement of Azure SQL Database Mirroring to Microsoft Fabric announcement. Apparently you can easily move Azure SQL Database data to Fabric and have it written to Delta Parquet tables in OneLake. No ETL, no need to do the data conversion yourself, or at least not much of an effort. I suspect you still need to understand this and do some configuration for how your Parquet files will get written.

If you go through the documentation, it’s interesting (and annoying) to me that the docs keep saying replication. I hate when we’ve overloaded terms as mirroring and replication mean specific things in SQL Server, so I wish they would use some other term (copy, extract, ??) to describe what is happening.

Whether this is useful to analytic workloads remains to be seen. I am curious what the people working with Fabric think of this feature. I wonder if this is useful, or if this might cause headaches or performance issues. Since this feature is in preview, I doubt anyone knows yet, but it will be interesting to see how this compares with Synapse Link and if it is more or less helpful.

Moving data around for different purposes has always been a challenge. I know that some people might feel the costs involved in this aren’t worth it. I know a lot of technical people that would say “I could do that.” I have no idea what they costs are. but I know that a lot of people have spent a lot of hours managing ETL packages and adjusting them as schemas change and new requirements appear. I get the appeal of Synapse Link and this new Mirroring to Fabric features.

I do wish this type of feature was more solidly built into the SQL Server instance. I suspect it will come at some point, and it’s being tested and baked in Azure first. However, I hope that if/when it comes, that the feature has good tooling and some polish to its operation. We’ve had too many features in SQL Server that are partially built, with limited tooling, and a lack of performance characteristics that many of us would desire.

Steve Jones

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The Journey to Change

Posted on March 29, 2024 by way0utwest

I assume most of you reading this work with SQL Server, at least for some of your workday. I know there are plenty of you who also support Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or some other database platform. The results in our (Redgate’s) State of Database Landscape report showed that many organizations, indeed most, have more than one database platform in production.

This was also a theme in our Data Community Summit and Redgate Summit keynotes, where Ryan and Grant discussed their journey to learn a new platform (PostgreSQL). One, a requirement (Ryan) for a new job, and another, an opportunity (Grant) as the company focus shifted. I assume some of you out there have had similar experiences either moving towards, or away from, SQL Server.

I ran across a breaking up with SQL Server post from David Alcock, noting that his job had evolved from SQL Server to AWS, GCP, PostgreSQL, Python, and more. The author got tired of database work, had an opportunity to learn about new areas, and got excited while doing so. That’s similar to my career, where I did a lot of networking and administration work early in my career but saw an opportunity in databases (and financial rewards), so I worked to change. I enjoyed the new tech and built a great career. I wish David good luck on his journey.

For many of us, there is regular tension between gaining deeper knowledge and more expertise or broadening the variety of skills we have. We have to decide where we spend our time as time is a limited resource. Hopefully, we realize that improving our skills in some way is a good use of our time and are doing something. Anything is better than nothing.

At the same time, we need to find some balance and realize there are other demands on our time outside of work. Family, friends, hobbies, faith, all of these need some time for a healthy, balanced life. We might need to lean on our current skills and expertise at times, not investing in ourselves, but it shouldn’t be our long-term strategy. As I’ve said in a few presentations, evaluate your growth every quarter. You might take a few quarters off from learning but don’t take off a year. Or not multiple years. Invest in your skills regularly.

There are often rewards for improving our skills. These might be a raise, better choice of projects, better employment, or maybe even the spark to build your own business. It takes work, but I’ve not often found the time I spent was wasted. Even if I learn skills I don’t use or enjoy, I learn something about myself that helps me better direct my future career.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

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