A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andrew Pruski puts on the mad scientist lab coat:
In all honesty, this is just a bit of fun, I’m just playing around with the sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint stored procedure, I don’t expect anyone to actually do this in a live environment. Anyway…let’s run through how this works.
Even so, read on to see how you can do this.
Leave a CommentAndrew Pruski hits a REST API:
The sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint stored procedure that’s available in 2025 allows for SQL Server to hit external rest endpoints…which opens up quite a few interesting options.
I was thinking about this the other day and it occurred to me that Kubernetes has a REST API
But it’s not going to be trivial to hit, so click through for the steps.
Leave a CommentSteve Jones tries something new:
I’ve been very happy with Docker Desktop for years, running it on both laptop and desktop. However, a corporate decision was made to move to Rancher Desktop, so I now have an unexpected “opportunity” to learn something new.
Here’s a short post on how things went on the desktop and laptop.
I’m guessing corporate made the switch because of Docker for Desktop’s licensing costs. It is kind of funny how, in the Windows and even MacOS world, “Docker” is synonymous with “container,” whereas in the Linux world, that’s not at all the case.
Comments closedVlad Drumea tries out SQL Server 2025:
This post covers creating SQL Server 2025 containers in Podman, Qnap Container Station, and sqlcmd, and restoring a sample database to test the new version.
One important thing to remember is that all SQL Server 2025 containers are based on the Linux build of SQL Server. For 90% of tasks (give or take), that won’t matter, and you’ll still have a good time trying out the new version of SQL Server and make sure things still work in your databases the way you expect them to. But some functionality (e.g., merge replication) is not available in Linux and other functionality (like PolyBase or Machine Learning Services) has a very different installation process.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski controls the horizontal. Andrew Pruski controls the vertical:
One of the new features in Kubernetes v1.33 is the ability to resize CPU and memory resources for containers online, aka without having to recreate the pod the container is running in. In the past, when adjusting a pod’s resources, Kubernetes would delete the existing pod and create a new one via a controller.
Not a problem for applications that can have multiple replicas running, but for SQL Server this would cause a disruption as we (generally) only have one pod running SQL Server in a statefulset. Let’s see this in action.
Click through to see an example of normal behavior, followed by how it differs in the latest version of Kubernetes.
Comments closedSteve Jones shares some thoughts:
A report of cloud Kubernetes usage shows that these resources are being under-utiliized, over-provisioned, and costing more than necessary for many organizations. From the previous year, average CPU declined from 13% to 10%, and memory is used at only around 23%. Companies are over-provisioning their clusters, which is understandable. No one wants to have systems overloaded and users complaining about performance.
Steve goes on to list some of the challenges of running an orchestrator like Kubernetes (or OpenShift or whatever). There’s a lot of code and process behind them, and that can be challenging if you don’t have administrators who know what they’re doing. Even hosting in Azure Kubernetes Service or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service only removes some of the systems management pain. That said, there is a certain level of comfort in knowing that my applications will automatically restart if a problem occurs, so the pain is usually worth it.
Comments closedSven Loesekann deploys Apache Kafka 4.0:
With KRaft for Kafka ZooKeeper is no longer needed. KRaft is a protocol to select a leader among several server instances. That makes the Kafka setup much easier.
The new configuration is shown on the example of the MovieManager project.
Click through to see how you can install and configure Kafka without taking a dependency on ZooKeeper.
Comments closedJess Pomfret does a bit of cleanup work:
Azure Container Registries can easily become cluttered with many versions of images. Did you know that each ACR sku comes with a certain amount of storage included, and when you go over that, you’ll pay overage charges. Let’s look at how to check your current storage, keep your registry nice and tidy with an ACR clean-up task, and monitor the storage levels so you’ll never pay extra again!
It’s easy to run up the disk space usage with a container registry, especially if you have automated builds running.
Comments closedToday, my colleague wanted to quickly test out some dbatools commands to install the Ola Hallengren maintenance solution. They had a local instance of SQL installed, but it already had the maintenance jobs running, so it wasn’t a fresh, out of the box instance.
So let’s spin a SQL Server instance in seconds to test against! (Ok it’s seconds if you have the pre-requisites installed, but I’ll get you setup in a few minutes if not)!
Click through for a primer on using SQL Server in a container.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski builds a diagram:
The other day I came across an interesting repo on github, KubeDiagrams.
What this repo does is generate Kubernetes architecture diagrams from Kubernetes manifest files…nice!
Deploying applications to Kubernetes can get complicated fast…especially with stateful applications such as SQL Server.
So having the ability to easily generate diagrams is really helpful…because we all should be documenting everything, right?
Click through for instructions and a couple of gotchas Andrew ran into along the way.
Comments closed