Voice of the DBA

Tag: Database Weekly

  • State of the Cloud

    The Azure cloud is doing well.
    The Azure cloud is doing well.

    Microsoft has joined the billion dollar club. For Azure, that is. They announced that this platform and service will generate a billion dollars in revenue. It’s been growing, and at least one analyst expects the revenue to double annually. Profit is something else, but I know from various people at Microsoft that they are working hard and investing heavily in this service, and I’m sure at some point it will be profitable, though I’m not sure how much.

    Amazon has had a very successful AWS platform, providing a wide variety of services and products. Their aim is to go for the high volume, low margin business, which makes their service competitive with the costs of buying and managing your own hardware. As long as Amazon and other competitors are out there, I suspect cloud services will be cheap enough to make many companies consider moving some of their infrastructure to this type of environment. It certainly eases the time and effort of building new machines and encourages better development habits.

    As IT departments, especially the management of those groups consider using cloud type services, they still have to be aware that this isn’t a savings that comes for free. Code changes, staffing skill growth and mindset evolutions to take into the account the challenges of working in a cloud environment, as well as the SLAs that seem to favor the cloud providers more than the cloud customers, mean this isn’t an easy decision. Add to this the potential tax implications, and the decision to move away from current IT practices is not always obvious.

    The idea of cloud computing, and cloud services, is still very immature. From the definition of what this means, to the offerings, to the architectures, the industry has a lot of growth to do before most of us will feel comfortable moving substantial parts of our infrastructure out of our own facilities.

  • The Memory Cube

    How would you like memory in your SQL Server that’s 15 times as fast as your current DDR3 DRAM? I know I would, and since memory is often one of the things that can dramatically speed up, or hinder, SQL Server performance, this article about new memory cubes is good news. Over 100 companies have signed on to the specifications for three dimensional DRAM, which stacks memory dies on top of each other.
    How much better is the performance? Try 160GBps for this cube against the 11GBps that we typically see from DDR3. Even DDR4 is only 18-20GBps of aggregate bandwidth. What’s more, this new technology should require less power. That’s a good sign as more and more data centers are finding that power and cooling are significant issues and can end up being a significant percentage of the total cost of operating computer systems.
    This technology isn’t quite ready for production, as the prototypes only hold 2GB and 4GB of memory right now. However I would expect that to grow quickly as memory companies look to get production cubes out in 2013. The deployment will likely start in network devices and other environments where extremely high speed memory is needed, but I could see that server computers, especially those slated to handle large numbers of virtual machines, will move to this technology once capacities get over 32GB. At that point, there could be lots of OLTP systems that would benefit from faster access to memory, especially those systems backing high volume, (relatively) low storage systems.
    The bottleneck for many systems will continue to be the disk drives, but if you can process more data in memory, at a much faster rate, I’m sure there are lots of DBAs that would love to use this technology to reduce the number of complaints from their clients.
    Steve Jones

  • SSD Lifetimes

    Samsung 840 SSD
    This looks like a nice SSD upgrade that’s reliable.

    One of the things that has concerned many DBAs looking at SSD drives is the possible limited life of these drives. In the past, many consumer drives have had issues, and can fail without warning. However there are plenty of people that still love them for the fact that they are crazy fast and can dramatically speed up your system. Just make sure you keep good backups of your data since it may not be recoverable.

    For servers, a number of manufacturers have been working hard to build more reliability and longer lifetimes into their drives. FusionIO has listed 2 million hours and 6 years write endurance for their cards, which is a quite a long time. Other manufacturers are working hard as well and I suspect we’ll see more and more SSDs architected into SQL Server instances over the next few years. Microsoft has a white paper on using FusionIO cards in tempdb, and I know a few SQL Server installations have been quite pleased with their results of using these cards in production systems.

    This week I saw an analysis of the Samsung SSD 840 over at AnandTech. They examined the wear of this drive and came to the conclusions that writing over 10GiB a day, you’re still get many years of service from this drive. That gives me a lot of confidence in the drive, and with Amazon listing the 250GB version for $180, it’s an upgrade you might consider for your laptop.

  • The Avalanche Upgrade

    Reprinted from Database Weekly.

    Microsoft logos
    The avalanche of products coming this year

    This year, 2012, is quite a year for Microsoft. We saw SQL Server 2012, Systems Operations Center 2012, and released earlier this year. Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are due for release later this year. Office 15, Exchange 15, and Sharepoint 15 should enter beta this year, and IE 10 is certain to release at some point. We may even see a new version of Visual Studio in 2012. It is certainly a busy time for the developers up in Redmond.

    However that means that those of us that are working in IT are faced with a blizzard of upgrades. Even if you aren’t planing on performing the upgrades this year, I’m sure there will be requests and no shortage of stealth upgrades taking place in your company. There will certainly be Windows 8 installations coming on new PCs, which means wiping and reimaging.

    One one hand I like seeing Microsoft align the release dates of their products closely. This helps to ensure that the newest features are supported by the other platforms. It also means that we don’t have strange service pack/hotfix combinations of patches needed to get SQL Server to work with Windows or Visual Studio. That doesn’t help us with past products, and there’s already no shortage of compatibility issues between a few of the technologies.

    However this does mean that a lot of new learning and understanding is required in a short time by much of the IT staffs that must support these technologies. With many people dealing with multiple platforms, this means an even busier fall and winter as they try to understand all the changes that they will be tasked with supporting. My advice is that they start working with a product or two and reading about the changes now. That way you will have some background and context for the actual testing you’ll need to do next year.

    I don’t know how many people will upgrade this year, but even if you delay until late 2013, you’ll still have a lot of potential upgrades to plan, test, and schedule.