A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kevin Chant points out a change to Azure Data Studio:
I talked about the using the wizard in the Insiders build to deploy Big Data Cluster in that post. You can read that post in detail here.
Now, as well as deploying Big Data Clusters you can also use the wizard to deploy SQL Server container images locally using Docker.
Read on for notes about the process.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski takes us through one of the biggest changes with SQL Server 2019 in containers:
I’ve seen a few people online asking how to use docker named volumes with the new SQL Server 2019 RTM images. Microsoft changed the way SQL runs within a container for the RTM versions, SQL no longer runs as the root user.
This is a good thing but does throw up some issues when mounting volumes to create databases on.
Let’s run through what the issue is and how to overcome it.
Click through to see what you need to add to your DOCKERFILE to get things working.
Comments closedA few months ago I posted a blog on deploying a BDC using the built-in ADS notebook. This blog post will go a bit deeper into deploying a Big Data Cluster on AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) using Azure Data Studio (version 1.13.0). In addition, I’ll go over the pros and cons and dive deeper into the reasons why I recommend going with AKS for your Big Data Cluster deployments.
AKS does make it pretty easy. The toughest part for me was figuring out which instance types were supported—I tried a few which would save me money and they weren’t available. I do like that they added a check to view availability before completing the notebook; that wasn’t in the preview version.
Comments closedGrant Fritchey follows up on a Kevin Hill tweet:
There are a million things to learn about in our rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I think this assessment, especially the way it was put, “no longer justify ignoring” really nails some of the fundamentals.
Let’s talk about why you can no longer ignore Docker, Git and DBATools either.
If you’re a DBA and aren’t familiar with Docker, Git, or DBATools, that’s a pretty good trio of things to spend some time learning. You can survive without them, but you’re more likely to thrive if you know them.
Comments closedAnibal Kolker takes us through container deployment in Azure:
As derived from the title, the objective of this post is to help you deploy a container instance inside Azure.
However, we’ll extend the typical scenario and make a slightly more extensive use of networking capabilities, by placing the container group inside a private subnet.
Note: For this example, and for simplicity only, we’ll use NGINX as our container of choice. Of course, you’re welcome to try with any other image.
There are a few pieces in play, but Anibal does a good job putting it all together.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski shows how we can use GitHub Package Registry to store private container images:
The GitHub Package Registry is available for beta testing and allows us to store container images in it, basically giving us the same functionality as the Docker Hub.
However the Docker Hub only allows for one private repository per free account whereas the Github package registry is completely private! Let’s run through a simple demo to create a registry and upload an image.
It’s pretty easy to set up, so check it out.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino has an updated version of his Kubernetes installation guide:
Kubernetes is a distributed system, you will be creating a cluster which will have a master node that is in charge of all operations in your cluster. In this walkthrough we’ll create three workers which will run our applications. This cluster topology is, by no means, production ready. If you’re looking for production cluster builds check out Kubernetes documentation. Here and here. The primary components that need high availability in a Kubernetes cluster are the API Server which controls the state of the cluster and the etcd database which persists the state of the cluster. You can learn more about Kubernetes cluster components here. If you want to dive into Kubernetes more check out my Pluralsight Courses here! Where I have a dedicated course on Installation and Configuration.
In our demonstration here, the master is where the API Server, etcd, and the other control plan functions will live. The workers/nodes, will be joined to the cluster and run our application workloads.
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino doesn’t have all the RAM in the world:
With that Pod deployed, I loaded up a HammerDB TPC-C test with about 10GB of data and drove a workload against our SQL Server. Then while monitoring the workload…boom HammerDB throws connection errors and crashes. Let’s look at why.
First thing’s first, let’s check the Pods status with kubectl get pods. We’ll that’s interesting I have 13 Pods. 1 has a Status of Running and the remainder have are Evicted.
Anthony does a great job of explaining the problem and showing you the solution.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski explains to us why it can be bad to have a container user running as root:
Recently I noticed that Microsoft uploaded a new dockerfile to the mssql-docker repository on Github. This dockerfile was under the mssql-server-linux-non-root directory and (you guessed it) allows SQL Server containers to run as non-root.
But why is running a container as root bad? Let’s run through an example.
Just as with physical devices and VMs before them, Docker containers can do a lot of damage if you’re logged in as root.
Comments closedVin Yu announces a change to Microsoft’s container configuration for SQL Server 2019:
The application process within most Docker containers is running as a root user meaning the process has root privileges within the container user space. The root user within the container is also the same root (uid 0) on the host machine, and if the user can break out of the container, they would have root permissions on the host. Running as root is convenient for development, testing and CI/CD use cases but for production use cases, it is safest to run SQL Server as a non-root process within the container. In this blog, we’re going to share with you how you can preview this upcoming improvement by creating your own non-root SQL Server container.
Vin has a quick demonstration of how it works.
Comments closed