Voice of the DBA

Tag: SQL Azure

  • An Azure Outage

    SQL Azure
    Azure was down recently

    There was a Windows Azure outage on Feb 29, which resulted in the management service being down for about 8 hours. The actual virtual machines that most customers had were unaffected, but the ability to perform management functions was down for a number of customers.

    That’s distressing for customers, and embarrassing for Microsoft, who is spending a lot of resources to promote cloud computing and their Azure services. It lends credence to the fears and concerns of many technology professionals that outsourcing parts of their infrastructure to a cloud provider is a problem.

    However is it a big problem? I’ve had outages in nearly every company I’ve worked, often because of problems in the architectures that are built by those same IT people that disparage the cloud. I’ve found that a few outages were from vendor patches, a few from failures, and a good portion were stupid mistakes, often from a lack of testing. We worked hard to fix things, but we often weren’t able to give management much more of an idea when things would be working than a good status page for Azure would provide.

    It’s easy to disparage outsourced services as less reliable than in-house services, but I’m not sure that’s true. There is definitely a loss of control, but that comes at a cost savings, and the balance between them is something that each company needs to decide. However I think lots of management might prefer in-house infrastructure for a simple reason: it gives them a specific neck to choke, and possibly replace, when things go wrong.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Azure is Down

    I saw a note about an outage on Windows Azure, apparently one that’s been going on for seven hours. Once again it seems that February 29 has struck again with a computer issue, and it makes me worry that if we mess with daylight savings time, we might have similar issues in the future.

    I went to the main Azure page, and this is what I saw

    azuredown

    I wrote about cloud computing today, and higher salaries. While this isn’t good news for the cloud, perhaps it means that salaries will be even higher.

  • NewSQL Can Save the World

    Michael Stonebraker, a database pioneer and researcher, recently said that Facebook’s implementation of MySQL was “a fate worse than death,” and they ought to rewrite their entire infrastructure. I think that analogy is a bit extreme. That statement also shows me that relational databases can scale to some dramatic heights with creative engineering as Facebook as shown with MySQL. I suspect that Facebook could easily use SQL Server and complex sharding of data to power the site if they wanted to in place of MySQL.

    Mr. Stonebraker has another solution for the “oldSQL” problem of scaling to very high volumes of transactions while maintaining ACID principles. He has a company that makes VoltDB, a database that lives in memory, complies with ACID principles, and can scale to very high transaction volumes.

    Can VoltDB solve the RDBMS scaling issues?

    That’s part of a wave of products that are classified as “NewSQL”, or even ScalableSQL, solutions. These databases embrace the power of SQL and even relational databases, but build scalability and high availability directly into the products. It’s interesting to see SQL Azure on the list of NewSQL products, and it makes me think that Azure is much more than just a VM in the cloud running SQL Server. At least I hope it is and includes some scaling features beyond what a single VM can provide.

    Running in memory scares me, but perhaps if you expect failure of nodes, and you have some sort of replication of the data among many nodes, it can work. I do worry about the consistency across the nodes and the latency that can affect this, but perhaps these products do a good job of addressing these concerns. I still think a large scale power failure could be disastrous, so I assume these products do write to disk at some point.

    I do agree that the relational model can scale, and I’m sure that we will see SQL Server grow to encompass and accommodate the concerns of customers that need to run large scale databases in the future. I’m just not sure how they’ll do it.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • A SQL Azure Customer

    Not me, though I’m not necessarily against Azure in principle. I had a friend ask me for a SQL Server hosting provider the other day, saying they had built a web front end, and had a web host, but were thinking to separate out some data to a separate provider. I have no idea why, or what this was.

    “Have you looked at SQL Azure?” I queried?

    He responded to say he was embarrassed to say he didn’t know what Azure was. I told him that I wasn’t completely sure myself, but it offered SQL Server almost as a web service, and it might work for him.

    “$9.99/mo for a 1GB database? I’m in” was what I heard a bit later. I did caution him to be careful of transactions and transfer. Test locally was my advice.

    We’ll see how he likes it. I’ll follow up in a few weeks and see what he thinks.