Swimming Servers

Posted on April 28, 2021 by way0utwest

Microsoft put a data center on the bottom of the ocean, and it appeared to be a successful experiment, but now they’ve brought the water to the servers. Rather than sink a data center, which means cumbersome maintenance if there are issues, Microsoft is just sinking server boards.

Their latest experiment takes liquid cooling in a new direction. In a vat of fluid, they have dozens of servers submerged. The liquid has a low boiling point and turns into a gas when contacting a CPU. The gas circulates like a miniature water cycle, condensing back into liquid when hitting a cool lid.

I’ve always assumed all liquid would be bad on an electrical server board, but I guess this isn’t the case. I’ve heard of liquid cooling for home PCs, and my son actually added a system to his game machine, but I’ve always been nervous about doing so. I think my limited, and often error prone, experience with home plumbing repairs has be scared.

I’ve rarely enjoyed being in a data center, especially the more modern designs that have a hot aisle and a cool aisle. Moving from one to the other is quite an experience, and one that I can’t think it good for your health over time. The older “cool” rooms I’ve been in weren’t much better, where I wore a winter coat all day when outside temperatures were 90F/30C and higher.

I don’t know that this will impact me, or if I’ll ever actually see another server machine in my career, but I do know we continue to demand more computing capacity and capability. Perhaps at some point a data center for Azure or AWS will look more a like a warehouse for freezers and anything else. At least the people servicing the systems will likely have a better work environment when the entire space doesn’t need to be cooled down.

Steve Jones

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Daily Coping 28 Apr 2021

Posted on April 28, 2021 by way0utwest

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 focus on a eating a “rainbow” of vegetables today.

I like cooking. I find it relaxing, especially when I’m not rushed and can have a glass of wine while I work. Most days now it’s just my wife and I, and she is a good influence in trying to get me to cook a little healthier.

Recently I found a recipe for Primavera Stuffed Chicken a few weeks ago and decided to try it. My oldest son was coming by for dinner, and I knew he’d enjoy it as well. I spiced it up by adding some yellow squash and asparagus as well, getting some more vegetables in there. With a salad that had some purple leaves and colored tomatoes, I think I got a nice rainbow.

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A Cloud Database for Statistics

Posted on April 27, 2021 by way0utwest

Baseball is an interesting game from a data perspective, with lots of numbers being tracked, and lots being generated every year. I used to have a sample database for demos that I used, since it was fun to run various numerical queries on the data. I should set that back up.

Recently I saw that an analysis site, FanGraphs, was adopting MariaBD, but in a cloud version of the database. They gather a lot of statistics, more than most places publish. Not only do they have the various aggregates from games, but they have tracking for things like the velocity of pitches thrown. Add that to odds, projections, and more, and this is a lot of data.

For a fan, that’s a lot. For database people, maybe not so much. They are projecting a million records each season for pitches, which might be the largest data set. However, for a database, even with 100 years of baseball, 100mm rows isn’t that large. There can be, however, lots of queries on this data.

The founder used to manage the database himself, and has been on MariaDB for a long time. He started on Windows, but has been looking to outsource some of the administration. They left dedicated servers to move to a vendor running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Now they are looking at data warehousing and other options to continue with deeper data analysis options.

The move to the cloud, removing some of the headaches and hassles of managing servers is something many executives think about. Certainly it isn’t cheaper than buying your own machines, but with the cost of people, benefits, and the inflexibility of being limited by past decisions, I get why companies do this. Especially those that aren’t so focused on the technology, but are more interested in what technology can enable them to do.

Many of us working might find opportunities to work with data at a company like this, without the need to actually manage the systems. I can imagine for a data analyst or developer that enjoys baseball, this might be a fun type of challenge. Learn to apply technology at a company that doesn’t really care about the software itself, but wants to use it to build something new and exciting for their customers.

Steve Jones

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Daily Coping 27 Apr 2021

Posted on April 27, 2021 by way0utwest

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 pick a new musical artist and listen to a few songs today.

I love music, and a few of my coping tips have noted that. One thing I used to do when I traveled on planes by myself was download a few albums from one artist and listen on the plane. It might be someone I knew a few songs from, or someone recommended to me.

For this tip, my wife turned me on to PJ Morton, who reminds me of Stevie Wonder. I downloaded a few albums of his the last time I flew in 2019.

On Spotify, there’s a “Fans Also Like” section for artists, and I decided to try someone else that was on that page for PJ Morton. I found Jonathan Nelson and gave him a try. It’ s a little more gospel/spiritual than I like, but not bad.

I also ran through an album from Ledisi, which is softer, quieter, and relaxing. I really enjoyed her.

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