Voice of the DBA

Tag: Microsoft

  • SOS to ADS

    When Microsoft announced SQL Operations Studio last year, I wasn’t thrilled. The move to a VS Code shell was less of a concern to me than having a better SSMS toolset. Actually, with VS moving to MacOS, I was hoping we’d get a slimmer, closer VS version of SSMS that allowed add-ins, extensions, and plugins.

    No such luck. We got SQL Operations Studio, which had the unfortunate acronym of SOS. To top it off, I felt this was more of a developer tool, but the name implies a DBA/sysadmin tool. To me this was a tool somewhat lost in its mission.

    Now we have Azure Data Studio, the renamed SOS, which is interesting. I know there are more features than SOS and some additional work coming, but I can’t get too excited. Other than people that want native connections to a server from OSX and Linux and write T-SQL, is this that useful?

    You can download it and see what you think.

  • The Data Submarine

    For some reason, this came to mind: under the sea, under the sea. That’s what I thought of as I was reading about Microsoft sinking a data center. There are probably jokes to be made about Microsoft and sinking, though they’re less humorous as the company’s stock price has risen quite a bit in the last few years.

    The is a research project from Microsoft on future data center design. Using modular devices that can be submerged for years at a time, only having a connection for power and data back to the surface. These are designed as sealed environments, without the creature comforts needed in data centers for human technicians. The systems inside are built to live on their own, using the water for cooling the heat generated by computations.

    There won’t be any repairs or replacements for failures. With the equivalent of twelve racks of servers in the system, I wonder how long they will list. I find it interesting that the experiment is designed for a year, though the device should have a timeline of 5 years. Does that mean that Microsoft expects current hardware to last for five years? Is that the new lifecycle of modern chips and storage? Or perhaps they find the lifecycle is shorter, but this is more a test of the extreme lifetime that they expect and they’ll track and chart the failures across time of components? I expect they already know some of the expected lifetime of hardware from their massive Azure data centers, which they can compare to this environment.

    It’s an interesting idea, and one that might see smaller, modular data centers spread around bodies of water where there is enough movement to carry heat away. This should reduce power consumption, as less is needed for cooling. This can also reduce latency, with devices perhaps located closer to clients for heavy compute capabilities or even content delivery.

    I’m not sure these will work at larger scales, as heat attracts life, with plant and animals potentially migrating to be near the submersibles. Who knows if were would be interference with operations, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some level of maintenance is needed. We might see the rise of a new type of job, like undersea gardener or window washer that keeps the submarines clear of encroaching biology.

    Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Roomba-like automated devices that put many of these humans out of work.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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  • Microsoft and GitHub

    I started using git with GitHub. I thought their hosted service was fantastic, and have seen quite a few companies using private repos for their internal code, including my employer, Redgate. I see companies from Five Thirty Eight to releasing their data to the MuseScore sheet music software to TensorFlow to Programmer’s Proverbs. There are no shortage of useful, inspiring, and helpful repos you can browse. There are also plenty of silly ones, like the

    I have a GitHub folder on all my machines, and that’s become the place where I just stick repos. Some of them go to VSTS, some to Bitbucket, but I still always think of GitHub first when writing code. The others work great, and I’m glad we have choice, but I’ve always been fond of GitHub as a company that opened up a place to share code and data in a way that was somehow more attractive and easier than SoundForce or Codeplex or any other location. Maybe it’s the ease of git, but I really liked the site. The GitHub for Windows, not so much, but I don’t expect everything a company does to be perfect.

    Microsoft is buying the company, and GitHub seems fine with this. As one of the heaviest users of GitHub, Microsoft has been releasing their code on the platform for some time. This seems like there are some synergies here, and this is a great way for Microsoft to continue to open up some of their code and support the development community on all platforms, languages, and environments. Microsoft has said that they’ll keep the open source model, though there is no shortage of concerns and complaints. There are also a fair number of jokes. The Linux Foundation isn’t upset, which should make some people rethink their concerns.

    This is an interesting topic for me, and I brought up concerns over IP with some people inside my company. After all, we compete directly with Microsoft in some places, and we wouldn’t them to copy (and rewrite) our code to add to their products. That could dramatically affect our business, but no one worries about that. Decompilers and our own Reflector could be used to understand how algorithms are implemented, and certainly Microsoft has the resources to do this if they want to. They don’t, and there are other business and legal protections to prevent this.

    In some sense, the actual code really isn’t as important as many of us think. Certainly it’s not in SQL Server where our object is readable by whoever controls the instance. That includes your encrypted code, which can be easily rendered readable. I’ve often thought that the value I provide with my code is that I wrote it, I support it, and I ensure you don’t burn way more time doing those things than necessary.

    I think for the most part GitHub isn’t going to change for me. I’ll still post code out there for demos and presentations and even sharing some code with my kid as he learns to program. It will take time for Microsoft to assimilate parts of the company, but overall, I expect that most of the platform will remain the same for a long time, especially if Microsoft can get more enterprise customers to use it for their systems, especially their database code.

    Steve Jones

  • A New New Microsoft

    Microsoft is changing again. Microsoft is reorganizing and the head of Windows, Terry Myerson, is leaving. The reorganization isn’t that surprising, as like most large companies, Microsoft usually does something each year. What is interesting is that they are moving away from their major divisions focusing on products. We’ve had divisions for Windows, Servers, Devices, etc. Now we move to Experiences and Devices as one major group. The other will be Cloud + AI Platform, which seems more product oriented, but still is rather amorphous. Gaming is still separate and there’s still a large Research engineering group.

    Why are they doing this? There’s some thoughts at ZDNet and Geekwire. It seems that the cloud is becoming the most profitable part of Microsoft, and I’d expect that we will continue to see more push for cloud and subscription type software. Along with the advances in AI, Microsoft seems to be hoping that more of us will start to do work using their infrastructure. That makes sense for some, but not for others.

    For those of us using the data platform, I do think that we ought to be thinking cloud first unless we already have substantial infrastructure and automation capabilities to quickly stand up new instances. As development and other departments look to get work done, especially around data analysis, we need to meet their needs or many people will start to use the easy to provision and use cloud services, especially those for machine learning and AI. Companies are entranced by new technology, even if we aren’t, and the media hype around ML and AI will put pressure on us to do better. We don’t need to learn R or Python, but we should be able to run those scripts against data if our business demands the capability.

    The GDPR and other security initiatives might seem to slow cloud deployment, but in many cases the cloud isn’t more or less secure than our own systems. Certainly we may have issues with privacy with the new US CLOUD Act, but for most of our businesses, that won’t really matter. The conflicts there are more around illegal activities, and if you are in that space, US based companies might not be your choice for hosting data.

    For many of us, we do need to understand how to build and enforce more secure applications, and I’d argue that Azure makes this as easy any any other system. Our recent move at SQLServerCentral to AWS was essentially the same as if we’d have moved to a VM at Azure, Google, or even back to the Redgate office. The systems look the same, it’s the cost, the firewall and networking, and things beyond the data platform that are just different. And that’s the key, they’re not necessarily better or worse, but different.

    As Microsoft changes, I think their code quality improves, though certainly their rapid pace means that people getting updates too quickly are on the bleeding edge. Their DevOps deployment, however, means that the bleeding edge usually doesn’t last tool long if the issues are severe.

    Steve Jones