Worthy of an editorial, but this is a pretty good use-case for why SQL Azure might make sense. This is a business where
Not everyone is in this type of business, but if you are, then SQL Azure might be worth looking at.
In the news this week, there was a major announcement. Buck Woody (blog | @BuckWoody), longtime Microsoft employee and favorite speaker of many in the community, bought an iPad. That in and of itself, with Buck’s frequent touting of Microsoft products, is amazing, and Buck wrote about it on his blog, noting that Windows Azure is platform independent. He even has a picture of a NASA app, something built on Azure, running on his new toy.
This week, SQL Azure finally gets its own web site, showcasing SQL Server in the cloud. I know lots of DBAs, and IT people in general might be down on computing in the cloud, but I’m not. I think that there are some problems, some applications, that will benefit from cloud computing. Not every instance of SQL Server should be moved to the cloud, but some will work better in the cloud. If nothing else, being able to use cloud services is another evolution of the hosted environments that so many small companies use today. You can get the services you need without the need to do as much administration or setup.
For most of us, the services that we might use on the Internet are platform independent. We don’t care that Facebook uses Cassandra, or Google uses BigTable, or that TractorByNet uses whatever technology they use. We just want our particular service to work, and it doesn’t mattter what the underlying technology is.
I think it’s the same with cloud computing. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it’s Azure, EC2, or some other service. Just like Brent Ozar views virtualization, I would bet that some of the time a cloud service is “good enough” to use.
The DBA job is somewhat nebulous, with a variety of skills being needed, and the mix of those skills varying from company to company. As companies look to save money, and look to perhaps go with cloud computing or other types of hosted environments, are DBAs going to need to also perform financial calculations?
I was reading a post on SQL Azure recently that talked about the cost of indexes. Not performance, or space, but actual real dollars and cents cost since indexes take up space and you are charged by the space you use. Adding extra indexes, or adding columns to indexes, or adding covering columns, can cost you real money if you have any large scale of resources.
So does that mean that in addition to trying to determine what changes you can make to code to improve performance, or what new features might make sense to your applications, you need to also run some financial ROI calculation on the choices? Maybe PowerPivot was released just in time for all those virtual systems that might charge by the byte or cycle.
As a DBA, I’ve had to budget, and try to determine how to spend funds for hardware, balancing out choices for RAM v disk v CPU, and even comparing secondary servers for read-only scale out against a larger single server. However I typically don’t have to compare the cost of features in my analysis.
I’ve sometimes wished I could pay for just one feature, and it’s starting to look like that might be something that could happen in the cloud. While the possibility if mix and match features intrigues me, the extra work to add cost to my calculations along with performance makes me think the cloud might be more trouble than it’s worth.
Steve Jones
Voice of the DBA 