A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Awesome! Our custom image is in our ACR!
But has it worked? Has it really? Oh ye of little faith…
I guess the only way to find out is to run a container! So let’s run a Azure Container Instance from our new image.
Spoilers: it worked.
Comments closedMarek Masko has some commands which will help DBAs get familiar with Docker:
Stop container
To stop container:
- docker stop <container ID>
To stop all running containers:
docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)
Most of the commands are straightforward but it’s nice to have a reference guide.
Comments closedThe mainstay of my presentation material this year has been my deck on continuous integration, Docker and Jenkins. For people who have not had the chance to see this presentation or have seen it and wanted to get some more context around it, I have written this first in a series of posts. Much, in fact just about all of the material in this post features in other posts on my blog. The aim of this set of posts is to present the material in a more digestible manner for people who might not be fully fully familiar with Docker and Jenkins.
This first post will cover an introduction to Jenkins and use of the “Sidecar pattern” for deploying DACPACs to. Subsequent posts will expand on this to include:
- Multi branch build pipelines
- Parallelism
- Unit testing with tSQLt
- The management of database state via Docker volumes
Many people in the SQL Server community have displayed a great interest in containers, only to be left scratching their heads thinking “Well, that is nice, but what can I practically use them for ?”. In my humble opinion, spinning up SQL Server inside a container as a deployment target for a continuous integration pipeline, is one of the, if not the best ways to leverage SQL Server and Docker.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski shows us how to deploy an Azure Container Instance:
The code should be fairly self explanatory. I’m using the username and password created earlier to access the ACR and am then spin up a container from the sqlserverlinuxagent:latest image. The container has 2 CPUs and 4GB of memory available to it and it will be listening on a public IP address on port 1433 (be very careful with this).
At the time of writing, the only option available for ip-address is public, hopefully further options will be available soon. I will update this blog if/when that happens.
Read on for a demo.
Comments closedContainer runtimes have security layers defined by Seccomp, Apparmor, kernel namespaces, cgroups, capabilities, and an unprivileged Linux user. All the layers don’t perfectly overlap, but a few do.
Let’s go over some of the ones that do overlap. I could do them all, but I would be here all day. The
mountsyscall is prevented by the default Apparmor profile, default Seccomp profile, andCAP_SYS_ADMIN. This is a neat example as it is literally three layers. Wow.Everyone’s favorite thing to complain about in containers or to prove that they know something is creating a fork bomb. Well this is actually easily preventable. With the PID cgroup you can set a max number of processes per container.
Interesting reading from an insider.
Comments closedI want to show the two modules running against a number of SQL Versions so I have installed
- 2 Domain Controllers
- 2 SQL 2017 instances on Windows 2016 with an Availability Group and WideWorldImporters database
- 1 Windows 2016 jump box with all the programmes I need
- 1 Windows 2016 with containers
using a VSTS build and this set of ARM templates and scripts
I wanted to create containers running SQL2017, SQL2016, SQL2014 and SQL2012 and restore versions of the AdventureWorks database onto each one.
Rob shows how to do this all via Powershell so you can automate the process.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski shows us how to store Docker images in Azure:
I’m going to push my custom dbafromthecold/sqlserverlinuxagent image. It’s a public image so if you want to use it, just run: –
docker pull dbafromthecold/sqlserverlinuxagent:latestSo similar to pushing to the Docker hub, we need to tag the image with the login server name that we retrieved a couple of commands ago and the name of the image: –
docker tag dbafromthecold/sqlserverlinuxagent apcontainerregistry01.azurecr.io/sqlserverlinuxagent:latest
Read on for a full example.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski notes an improvement with the April 2018 Windows update:
The April 2018 update for Windows brought a few cool things but the best one (imho) is that now we can now connect to Windows containers locally using ‘localhost’ and the port specified upon container runtime.
Let’s have a look at how this works.
Click through for a walkthrough.
Comments closedAndrew Pruski answers an attendee question:
A few weeks ago I was presenting at SQL Saturday Raleigh and was asked a question that I didn’t know the answer to.
The question was, “can you change the location of named volumes in docker?”
This is one of the things that I love about presenting, being asked questions that I don’t know the answer to. They give me something to go away and investigate (many thanks to Dave Walden (b|t) for his help!)
Read on for Andrew’s answer.
Comments closedSo, how do you do it when running SQL Server in Azure Container Services?
Well there’s a couple of options available.
The first one is to change the port that SQL is listening on in the container, open that port on the container, and direct to that port from the service.
The second one is to leave SQL Server listening on the default port and direct a non-default port to port 1433 from the service.
Read on to see Andrew try out both of these methods.
Comments closed