Category: Containers

SQL Server 2019 is now available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Red Hat Certified Container Images and Ubuntu-based container images enabling you to take advantage of the latest SQL Server engine innovations such as new SQL Graph features, and Data Discovery and Classification. We are also making it possible to adopt SQL Server in containers with existing scenarios such as Replication and Distributed Transaction which are now part of SQL Server 2019 on Linux.

This makes it easier to get started with SQL Server 2019 without potentially messing up your already-working systems.

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The Basics Of Kubernetes

Published 2018-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Adkin shares some thoughts on what Kubernetes is and why it might be interesting to data platform professionals:

I strongly urge anyone with an interest in learning Kubernetes to watch this presentation, as it makes a great job of explaining Kubernetes from the ground up.
“Out of the box”, Kubernetes will look after scheduling. If there is a requirement to ensure that pods only run on a specific set of nodes, there is a means of doing this via label selectors, as documented here. A label selector is a directive of influencing resource utilization related decisions made by the cluster.

Read the whole thing.

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Removing The Windows Container Service

Published 2018-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Melody Zacharias shows us how to remove the Windows container service from a machine:

This week I wanted to try out a new product from a vendor. I thought I may use it for a demo so wanted to be able to run it on my laptop. You never know when you go to do a demo and cannot access Azure, so I try to always put my demos on my laptop as a backup; just in case….
The product required me to remove all previous versions of windows containers on my machine. The vendor recommended I use this posh command.
Remove-WindowsFeature Containers
I was fairly sure I did not have any but wanted to check to make sure.

Melody walks through a few tricky issues, including the difference between the command on Windows 10 versus Windows Server.

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Thoughts On The Evolution Of Big Data

Published 2018-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Praveen Sripati shares an opinion on where the various Hadoop and Big Data platforms are headed:

The different Cloud Vendors had been offering Big Data as a service for quite some time. Athena, EMR, RedShift, Kinesis are a few of the services from AWS. There are similar offerings from Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and other Cloud vendors also. All these services are native to the Cloud (built for the Cloud) and provide tight integration with the other services from the Cloud vendor.
In the case of Cloudera, MapR and HortonWorks the Big Data platforms were not designed with the Cloud into considerations from the beginning and later the platforms were plugged or force fitted into the Cloud. The Open Hybrid Architecture Initiative is an initiative by HortonWorks to make their Big Data platform more and more Cloud native.

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

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Getting Started With Linux

Published 2018-08-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman has a new series on learning Linux for SQL Server DBAs:

As this series of articles are published, it will be important that you have a way to do some hands on with Linux, not just read about this powerful operating system. To accomplish this, my recommendation is to download Docker for Windows.
Choosing to use Docker over a VM or a cloud deployment might seem odd at first, but I’ve found that Docker is the perfect option from the testing and classes I’ve led. The Docker image is light–using a minute number of resources on any laptop. Access to the docker image isn’t dependent upon Wi-Fi or the user having a cloud account. The image, for the most part, offers an experience that is incredibly similar to a full Linux server in functionality for no additional cost.
Once you’ve downloaded Docker and have it installed, create a Linux container with SQL Server on your workstation, (thanks to Microsoft) to work with and build your knowledge. Start by opening a Command Prompt, cmd from the search option in Windows.

This post is mostly setup and updating packages. I also want to pitch We Speak Linux if you’re in this boat. Kellyn did our inaugural webinar, too.

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Tips For SQL Server On Linux + Docker

Published 2018-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman has a set of tips for working with SQL Server on Linux using Docker:

Easy Download
Docker is available for Mac and Windows with a simple installation by the defaults.
Download the correct installation for your OS type.
Run the installer and keep all the defaults, choosing Linux containers, not Windows containers
Reboot Windows workstations- Done.
Incredibly Simple MSSQL Container Install
Microsoft has done a great job of creating a very small, (maybe a bit too small, but we’ll get into that later…) image that can be used to create a running Linux container with SQL Server. This grants to student a great opportunity to simulate much of what it would be like to work on a real Linux server.

Click through to read the whole thing. And Kellyn’s not kidding about the image missing basic packages.

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Running Apache Kafka On Kubernetes

Published 2018-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rohit Bakhshi walks us through how to install Kafka on a Kubernetes cluster:

Now available on GitHub in developer preview are open-source Helm Chart deployment templates for Confluent Platform components. These templates enable developers to quickly provision Apache Kafka, Apache ZooKeeper, Confluent Schema Registry, Confluent REST Proxy, and Kafka Connect on Kubernetes, using official Confluent Platform Docker images.
Helm is an open-source packaging tool that helps you install applications and services on Kubernetes. Helm uses a packaging format called charts. A chart is a collection of YAML templates that describe a related set of Kubernetes resources.
For stateful components like Kafka and ZooKeeper, the Helm Charts use both StatefulSets to provide an identity to each pod in the form of an ordinal index, and Persistent Volumes that are always mounted for the pod. For stateless components, like REST Proxy, the Helm Charts utilize Deployments instead to provide an identity to each pod. Each component’s charts utilize Services to provide access to each pod.

Read on for more.

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SSL Provider Error: 31 With SQL Server In Docker

Published 2018-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski walks us through fixing a connection error:

I recently bought a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu 16.04 and ran into an issue when connecting SQL Operations Studio (version 0.31.4) to SQL 2017 CU9 running in a docker container. Other people seem to encountering this issue as well so am posting it so that it may be of some help to someone in the future.
The error generated was: –
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException (0x80131904): A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the pre-login handshake. (provider: SSL Provider, error: 31)
The full error can be viewed here

Read on for the solution.

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SQL Server On Containers Q&A

Published 2018-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino walks us through questions he received after his PASS marathon session on SQL Server and containers:

How do SQL Containers work with High Availability and Disaster Recovery?
Backups and data persistency are primary concerns here. You still need to care and feed for your SQL Server databases just as if they were platformed on a full operating system. For HA, Microsoft has some guidance on how to use Kubernetes to provide HA services to your SQL Server containers here. What I want you to think about when using containers for SQL Server is deploying a new container is VERY fast. We want to be able to persist the data and be able to stand up a new container and mount our data inside that container. Using this technique we can restore SQL Services very quickly with low RTO. That itself is an interesting way to provide HA services without any additional technologies.

Read on for more Q&A and check out Anthony’s presentation.

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Connecting GitHub To Azure Container Registry

Published 2018-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski automates the generation of SQL Server Docker images in Azure Container Registry, generating a new image with each GitHub repo check-in:

Fantastic, one build task created! How easy was that??
Let’s test by running: –
az acr build-task run --registry TestContainerRegistry01 --name buildsqlimage
And the progress of the build task can be monitored: –
az acr build-task logs --registry TestContainerRegistry01

Andrew gives us the step-by-step details, so check it out.

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