Cloud – Page 184 – Curated SQL

Azure Storage Options

Published 2015-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra walks us through the list of storage options available on Azure:

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed and Microsoft partner-hosted datacenters. Included in this platform are multiple ways of storing data. Below I will give a brief overview of each so you can get a feel for the best use case for each, with links provided that go into more detail:

There are several options available, running the gamut from unstructured data (blob storage, file & disk storage), semi-structured data (data lake store), to structured data (Azure SQL Database) and a few points in between.

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Building An Azure VM Of SQL Server 2016 CTP3

Published 2015-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English shows us an easy way to build a SQL Server 2016 CTP 3 instance:

If you have an Azure account (possibly through your MSDN subscription) here is the easiest way to get up and running with SQL Server 2016.
First go to the Azure Portal – http://portal.azure.com
Search and find the SQL Server 2016 CTP3 in the Data and Analytics Marketplace in Azure.

My preference is to grab the ISO and build a local VM, or install it on a server in my environment. But if your server infrastructure lives on Azure or you’ve got those MSDN credits to burn, this is a good alternative.

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Connect To Azure VM Via SSMS

Published 2015-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer shows you how to connect to an Azure VM hosting SQL Server:

After you provision a Microsoft Azure VM with SQL Server there are a few more steps that you need to take to make remote connections. The procedure below starts with a fresh Azure VM provisioned and walks through the process of establishing a connection via SQL Server Management Studio, installed on an on-premises work station.

Note that this is Azure IaaS, not Azure SQL Database.

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Red Gate SQL Monitor On Azure VMs

Published 2015-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton has a post on VLAN rules necessary to get Red Gate SQL Monitor to work in an environment running on Azure VMs:

Our basic architecture was:
Multiple VLANs containing SQL Servers to be monitored
VLAN containing the monitoring server
Probably not the best for what we were wanting to do, but you work with what you’re given. I installed SQL Monitor, fired it up, and nothing worked.
After much trial and error, and a lot of network monitoring by a very enthusiastic young infrastructure guy, here are the inbound rules that we needed to put in place on each SQL Server VLAN to get this working

Note that this is Azure IaaS, not Azure SQL Database.

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Get Started With U-SQL

Published 2015-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Microsoft is pushing U-SQL pretty hard. Here’s a tutorial by Jonathan Gao to whet your appetite:

U-SQL is a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of your own code to process all data at any scale. U-SQL’s scalable distributed query capability enables you to efficiently analyze data in the store and across relational stores such as Azure SQL Database. It enables you to process unstructured data by applying schema on read, insert custom logic and UDF’s, and includes extensibility to enable fine grained control over how to execute at scale. To learn more about the design philosophy behind U-SQL, please refer to this Visual Studio blog post.

You do need Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio, but it looks like you can run it locally.

The VS blog had something a month ago on the topic. I’m not saying get on it…yet…

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Microsoft & Red Hat Sittin’ In A Tree

Published 2015-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Microsoft and Red Hat have joined together to support Linux in Azure.

Customers can already run Linux on Azure, but the new partnership will expand support for running so-called “hybrid clouds,” in which applications may exist in both private data centers and on public cloud services. More significantly, Microsoft and Red Hat support teams will work together from the same facilities to support Red Hat customers using Azure. Microsoft vice president of cloud and enterprise Scott Guthrie said during a webcast today that this is the first time that he knows of that Microsoft has “co-located” support teams with another company.
The deal is the latest example of Microsoft playing nice with a former rival. “When we started [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] I never would have thought we’d do this,” Red Hat president of product and technology Paul Cormier said during the webcast.

Free speculation with no evidence: at some point, Microsoft will offer SQL Server on Linux. My guess is 3-5 years from now, but other co-speculators have suggested maybe even as soon as 18 months. Whatever the case, I’ll be a happy man when I can run SSMS in Linux.

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