Voice of the DBA

Tag: sql server

The Service Pack Fiasco
I remember getting a Service Pack years ago that caused a blue screen of death on Windows 2000 servers when it was installed. In fact, a quick search shows that quite a few operating systems (and SQL Server 2005) have had issues with SP2 over the years. Perhaps we shouldn’t be waiting for the first service pack to upgrade, but upgrading and then skipping SP2 for various products.

Microsoft has responded fairly well to problems with service packs by removing them quickly from their download sites and re-releasing them. This occurred recently for SQL Server 2014 SP1, where an issue was discovered with the SSIS Catalog. This is disconcerting to me, not because of the bugs, but because these mistakes and problems seem to lead Microsoft in the direction of abandoning Service Packs. The idea floated in the past, and still pushed by many people, is that the Cumulative Updates are good enough for patching SQL Server.

That seems crazy to me. If we have problems with a service pack, wouldn’t we still have problems with a CU? Or is Microsoft hoping that the smaller group of people that are impacted with CU issues are good beta testers and limit the impact of issues to the community? I’m assuming the testing is similar for all patches, if not the same. However as we all know, testing can’t cover every possible scenario. Microsoft notes this as their latest documentation includes these quotes:
I really prefer that a service pack is released every year for each product. It can contain all the CUs up to that point, with no additional patches, thought hopefully a bit more testing. It should be a line in the sand that helps administrators manage their systems to keep up with patching and reduce support requirements. I’d actually even suggest Microsoft require vendors that want to certify their products on SQL Server and use any logo, validate their software on an SP within four months of release. In most cases, there isn’t any work for vendors, merely the effort to re-run all their tests.

We pay a large licensing cost for SQL Server, and the lifecycle support policy under which many of us purchased our software notes that we’ll get ten years of support and the term “service pack” is embedded throughout the SQL Server support pages. We should receive a service pack every year to provide continuing support for our platforms.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.
May 11, 2015
vNext 2016

We have a name for the next version of SQL Server: SQL Server 2016. I suspect the internal build may be v14, which I guess makes sense if you’re superstitious about the number 13, or you think your customers are. There are plenty of v13s out there for various other software packages, so I’m not sure if this is an issue, but we’ll see when we get a public CTP for the next version of SQL Server.

vNext has been the way to refer to the next version of Microsoft products before a decision is announced about the official name. This convention seems to have taken over from code names, which makes sense, but it certainly is less fun than hearing Denali, Yukon, or some of the names that have been used for SQL Server.

Perhaps this is a sign of maturity within Microsoft? It certainly could be as releasing a new version of SQL Server every two years doesn’t happen without some discipline and rigorous engineering effort. Despite the issues with SQL Server 2014 SP1, I do think Microsoft has done a nice job taking a formal approach to software engineering with SQL Server.

I am a bit more interested in SQL Server 2016 than I was in SQL Server 2014. Perhaps that’s just the fact that some significant changes might take longer than two years to implement and a number of them are coming in SQL Server 2016. I certainly looked forward to SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012 more than the “R2” and 2014 releases. It has seemed that every other release has more significant enhancements and includes more reasons for me to consider upgrading. I think SQL Server 2016 is one of those releases.

The datasheet shows a number of features that I Think make this a compelling release. I worry about security and the Always Encrypted idea seems very interesting. We’ll see how it looks once we get details. I like the improvements to AlwaysOn as well as the changes to include JSON and R support into the database engine. Row Level Security is in Azure now, but I think that’s important in the boxed product, and, of course, the Query Store is something I’ve been looking forward to for years. If you don’t know about that, read about it now. I was hoping to link to Conor Cunningham’s SQL Bits session, but I’m guessing recording wasn’t allowed.

There’s more coming, including the “Stretch to Azure” feature, which I’m not sure about. I’d feel better about “copy to Azure”, but perhaps I can keep local filegroup backups of this data, so that might make sense. I’m sure many of you won’t like some features, but this does seem like a compelling release. Depending on how pricing and licensing might change.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

May 7, 2015
Can Auditing Fail?

I saw someone’s list of requirements for a SQL Server auditing system recently that included many of the standard items most of us would want. DDL changes should be captured, along with configuration alterations. The performance impact should be low, and all versions of SQL Server must be supported. However, there was one requirement that surprised me. This person noted that the auditing must be asynchronous and the application should not be dependent on the auditing. If auditing failed, the application shouldn’t have any of its transactions limited or rolled back.

I’m sure there are use cases where this is important, and where the auditing might not be critical, but the auditing data is available for informational purposes to troubleshoot any issues that relate to the database. However in many places where auditors review information, or the data is part of a legal record, the auditing cannot fail. If it does, then the application needs to stop working. If an audit is truly an audit of activity, then all activity must be audited.

The C2 audit mode in SQL Server has been deprecated. Probably for multiple reasons, but It did seem that the idea that a failure in auditing could stop the database wasn’t a setting many people were willing to implement. To me, this means that auditing isn’t as important as having the system continue to process data. If that’s the case, then is auditing that important?

I know auditing data can be overwhelming. I know that the management of audit data, including archival, is complex. I also know that most of the data isn’t very useful and will never be examined. However when we need audit data, we really, really, need accurate audit data. I really wish that Microsoft would integrate auditing better into SQL Server to ensure the data can be easily managed, compressed, and archived in an automated fashion.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

May 5, 2015
VMware and DBAs

Disclosure: I’m a VMware fan and run it on my laptop. I definitely prefer it to other hypervisors. This workshop and all travel expenses was also paid for entirely by VMware.

I was fortunate and grateful to be invited out to VMware recently for a multi-day workshop for SQL Server on VMware. Michael Corey wrote about the workshop here, which was an interesting way for VMware to reach out to the SQL Community and both talk to us about what they’re doing as well as get feedback from us on how SQL Server performs and interacts with the VMware platform. They will do more in the future, so if you’re active in the community or a heavy user, read Michael’s post and see if you can get yourself nominated.

The week was full of speakers from both VMware and Tintri, a storage vendor doing interesting things. We had quite a few executives talking about their plans to make SQL Server run better, and we (as a group) provided lots of feedback. Certainly I think we helped to ensure executives understand that a database server is fundamentally different from a file server, mail server, or other workload.

Of course, it wasn’t all work.

I can’t talk about lots of what we discussed, as much is under NDA, but I will say that you should keep an eye on how VMware is going to improve their interaction with SQL Server. Hopefully we’ll see more products, information, and help at some of the SQL Saturdays and other SQL Server specific events.

We also got a night out at ATT Park in San Francisco where the various attendees and speakers could interact in a casual atmosphere. An exciting game, with two of the best pitchers in the game throwing that night (Kershaw and Bumgarner).

I’d never been there, so it was a treat for me. I walked around and enjoyed the baseball game, the first one I’ve seen live in a couple years.

Overall it was a very interesting time, with lots of points raised by everyone that I hadn’t considered or thought of. The more I hear about what the ESX platform does and handles, as well as hearing about how people have set up the platform. There are truly some powerful instances being run in a virtualized environment and I’m not sure there are many workloads that couldn’t be run successfully on VMware.

I’m sure that there are hardware and budget restrictions for many people, but the issues aren’t VMware or virtualization, they’re the setup. In the labs we worked on, quite a few of the systems pressed a SQL Server instance hard, and the hypervisor and storage system kept up nicely.

Not to disparage Hyper-V, but I haven’t had the experience there. I suspect both hypervisors could be tuned to a high level. Both also have some holes and places where the system might not run as smoothly as you’d like, but at least I think VMware is more aware of what we, as SQL Server professionals, see as problems.

Tintri

I have to admit that I have mostly though of storage as a utility. It needs to work and respond fast, but beyond that, I don’t care about it. It’s like a water faucet. I turn it on and it works.

Tintri was the guest storage vendor that provided appliances for us to use. I didn’t’ think much of them on Tuesday morning, but by the time their founder had talked with us, I was very intrigued. I still don’t really care about storage other than needing it to work, but I was very intrigued by how this particular product works.

Most storage is presented as a LUN to a host, which may or may not share that among guests running on a box. Tintri changes that, with what they call VM aware storage, with VM level QOS. Essentially, the storage box is aware of each guest connected as a VM. It manages the storage response and bandwidth on a VM basis, with separate FIFO queues for each drive in the VM. Essentially each VM is treated separately and the storage capabilities (min and max IOPS) can be managed separately.

It seems as though VMs get better response from the appliance this way, with less dependency on heavy management by storage admins. They also use a lot of flash memory (SSDs) with disks to ensure fast responses. They do 100% write to flash for speed and tune the systems to aim for 99% reads from flash. Because the device is aware of VMs, it can move blocks around from flash to disk to ensure that the heavily used data is quickly available.

If you have heavy needs, check them out. If you’re looking for a SAN, I’d look at them as well. Not sure what the pricing is, but I bet it’s competitive with other SAN devices.

We also got a lecture about low level storage technologies from a VMware exec. The talk looked at the advances taking place in storage, which seem to be finally leaping forward. With the price of SSDs crashing, and the research into 3D flash, it seems that though more and more of us might move to flash based SAN storage quicker than we expect. Fascinating stuff, and I suspect that database systems will start to see better performance from hardware upgrades across the next 6-7 years.

A Break

It was nice to get away and learn something without any pressure to work on much else. This was a short workshop, close to home, and in an area that had me concentrating and paying attention in ways that sometimes don’t happen at SQL Server events. I enjoyed it, and I learned quite a few things.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use this stuff moving forward, but I am thinking that I’d like to play around with an ESX server at home and use that to experiment with SQL Server features and especially setup. I’m looking forward to trying to get a system ready that can build a new SQL Server instance in minutes.

May 1, 2015