The Bit Bucket

In the sessions that I was attending in Redmond yesterday, I was interested to see the presenter discussing the idea of having individual database files in the cloud as some sort of bizarre option that’s now available in SQL Server 2014. I don’t see it as bizarre at all. However, I see two distinct use cases that make complete sense to me:

Overcoming Drive Limitations in Azure-based SQL Virtual Machines

One of the current limitations of running SQL Server in Azure virtual machines is that you can only attach two additional data drives per CPU core, and each of those drives is up to 1 TB in size. For example, if you spin up a two core VM, you can attach 4 data drives.

2013-11-20

I had the distinct honour (honor) this week of recording a new SQL Down Under podcast with Dr David DeWitt from the Jim Gray Systems Lab at Microsoft. Anyone that has been to a PASS summit over the last few years would know that David seems to have single-handedly converted morning keynotes into must-attend events.

In this podcast, David explains his role, gives a philosophical view on where we’re at in the database industry and discusses core enhancements in SQL Server 2014.

2013-11-14

I posted another podcast over the weekend. Late last week, I managed to get a show recorded with Adam Machanic. Adam’s always fascinating. In this show, he’s talking about what he’s found regarding increasing query performance using parallelism. Late in the show, he gives his thoughts on a number of topics related to the upcoming SQL Server 2014.

Enjoy!

The show is online now: SQL Down Under Podcast

2013-06-30

I have to say that I continue to be frustrated with finding out how to do things in Windows 8. Here’s another one and it’s recorded so it might help someone else. I’ve also documented what I tried so that if anyone from the product group ever reads this, they’ll understand how I searched for it and might try to make it easier.

I wanted to add a network loopback adapter, to have a fixed IP address to work with when using an “internal” network with Hyper-V. (The fact that I even need to do this is also painful. I don’t know why Hyper-V can’t make it easy to work with host system folders, etc. as easily as I can with VirtualPC, VirtualBox, etc. but that’s a topic for another day).

2013-06-13

If you have followed any of the Azure website forums, you’d realize that having SSL available was one of the highest rated requests. That’s hardly surprising given the number of clients that want to use these sites for eCommerce work.

So it’s really good to see that Scott Guthrie and the team have been listening and that SSL is now available. To see the details, click on the “SSL” button in the “Learn More” area of the Azure pricing page. An FAQ is also provided.

2013-06-03

Yesterday I was at a site where they decided to change the service account for the SQL Server services on a set of systems. After changing the service accounts, SQL Server restarted just fine on all machines except one.

I had used the SQL Server Configuration Manager to make the changes (important to not just use the Services applet in Administrative Tools) but I got the typical error telling me that the service wouldn’t start in a timely fashion. The server was running SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2.

2013-05-30

I was so glad to hear today that Azure is expanding to Australia. This helps with two remaining areas of concern that I’ve heard from a variety of customers:

• Compliance and data sovereignty (not wanting to store data outside Australia)
• Latency (previously high latency even to our nearest external data centres)

With both these concerns now disappearing, it’s time for more Australian customers to get involved with Azure if they’ve been resisting so far. 

2013-05-21

Hi Folks,

On Thursday night, I got to record a podcast with Reza Rad. I was interested to speak to Reza after reading his SQL Server 2012 Integration Services Cookbook.

In the show, we discuss SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) extensibility and some aspects of performance tuning for SSIS.

You’ll find the show here: SQL Down Under Podcast

Enjoy!

2013-05-13

I posted the other day about a hotfix that’s needed after you apply SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU3, to still be able to open or edit SSIS projects or database maintenance plans in SSDT.

However, I found that after I applied CU3 and the hotfix, that all my stored credential details for SQL Servers was gone. That was particularly nasty for all my Azure-related logons. I had to set them up again.

2013-04-09

Cumulative Update 3 for SP1 for SQL Server 2012 caused a number of problems with SSIS packages. This also applies to database maintenance plans as they are also SSIS packages.

After applying the update, you could get this error when opening an SSIS package:

The type initializer for ‘Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Design.SharedIcons’ threw an exception.
Value of ’null’ is not valid for ‘stream’. (System.Drawing)

If you edit a maintenance plan, you could get this error:

2013-04-06