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Category: Hardware

Microsoft Now Offering Replacement Hardware for Surface Devices

Laurent Giret shares the good news;

Starting today, Microsoft is now offering replacement components for Surface devices in its Microsoft Store. This should be great news for consumers with Surface devices that are out of warranty, and Microsoft is also offering free repair guides for its various Surface devices.

“While we have always offered world-class warranty and repair services via Microsoft support, we have been working to increase repair options by designing products that are easier to repair and by expanding our network of Authorized Service Providers. As part of this larger initiative, we are excited to offer replacement components to technically inclined consumers for out-of-warranty, self repair,” announced Tim McGuiggan, VP Devices Services & Product Engineering at Microsoft.

I’m big enough on right-to-repair that I’ll even mention it here. That said, the prices are, uh, a bit high. Compare to Framework’s prices for their parts and I guess the best advice is still, “don’t break your stuff.” But I’m happy to see Microsoft make these parts available and put out the guides. For decades, there was a norm that you released the tech specs and made repair parts available, and any step we see toward moving back to that norm is something I’m happy with.

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Setting CPU Affinity (Correctly)

Taiob Ali does something out of the ordinary:

Setting CPU affinity in SQL Server is not a task you do every day. Rarely are there use cases when you need to do that. I had a recent requirement to do it. We plan to replace a physical server with half of its current CPU. Primarily due to faster CPU and workload moved off of SQL Server to other cloud services. To test, we needed to set the CPU affinity mask in one of our non-production servers. In the research, I learned about the side effect of setting CPU affinity mask, which is nicely explained in this ( by Klaus Aschenbrenner) and this (by Adam Denby) blog post.

Click through to learn more about the process.

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Running SQL Server on an M2 Processor

Anthony Nocentino operates a Mac:

Last week I purchased a shiny new MacBook Air with an M2 processor. After I got all the standard stuff up and running, I set out to learn how to run SQL Server containers on this new hardware. This post shows you how to run SQL Server on Apple Silicon using colima.

Colima is a container runtime that runs a Linux VM on your Mac. This Linux VM runs using the Virtualization framework hypervisor native in MacOS. Your containers will run inside this virtual machine.

Read on to see what you’d need for the task.

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Hardware and Finger-Pointing

Glenn Berry gives us two rants for the price of one:

This is rant #1. Even though I have an unusual fascination with computer hardware, I am still somewhat taken aback when I encounter DBAs who have absolutely no idea what type of hardware they are using. I’ll sometimes ask a DBA “What processor does your most important database server have?”, and I often get a “deer in headlights” look in response. Then a mumbled response, “I’m not sure, maybe a Xeon?”.

Read on for this rant, as well as the origin story of Glenn’s outstanding SQL Server Diagnostic Information Queries.

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Testing Azure SQL MI Premium

Joe Obbish reaches for the top shelf:

At Microsoft Ignite 2021, public preview for new “premium-series” hardware was announced for Azure SQL Managed Instances. There’s even a black friday sort of sale during this month where you can do testing on premium-series VMs without paying for the compute costs. As someone without free cloud bucks: sign me up!

I did some basic query benchmarking to get an idea of the performance difference between the new premium VMs and the standard gen 5 VMs. The test VMs aren’t identical in specs: the standard-series has 4 vCore with 20.4 GB of memory and the premium-series has 8 vCore with 56 GB of memory. I will attempt to call out any situations where that spec difference had a measurable impact.

Read on for Joe’s findings.

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AMD Processor Recommendations for SQL Server

Glenn Berry has some thoughts on AMD’s EPYC line of processors:

Over the years, I have written many articles about the fine art of processor selection for SQL Server. This is an important topic, because it has a direct relationship to your SQL Server license costs. It also affects your performance and scalability. As new processor families are introduced, I do the required analytical work and update my recommendations. In this post, I will list my recommended AMD Processors for SQL Server.

I’m just happy that the answer isn’t a null set anymore.

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Installing .NET Core on a Raspberry Pi 4

Hasan Savran continues a series on Microsoft + Pi:

I have been writing about Azure IOT Hub and Raspberry Pi 4. So far, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4. I registered it as Azure IOT Edge device. Now, I am ready to write some code in Raspberry Pi. In this post, I will show you how install .NET Core 3.1 to Raspberry Pi so we can write some code to generate some data and push this data to Azure IOT Hub.

     First, you need to go to the .NET Core homepage to get the latest version’s url. Following page lists all .NET Core version, 3.1 was the latest when I was writing this blog. Pick the latest one from this list.

Another route might be to install Docker on your Pi.

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Choosing the Right Azure VM Type for SQL Server

Glenn Berry walks us through Azure virtual machine classes and picks out good ones for running SQL Server:

For high performance OLTP SQL Server workloads, the memory optimized type of Azure VMs is usually the best choice. According to Microsoft, “Memory optimized VM sizes offer a high memory-to-CPU ratio that are great for relational database servers.” This gives you lower core counts, with more memory, which is usually what you want for SQL Server, to minimize your license costs and still have good performance.

You can go even further down this path with Constrained vCPU capable VM sizes, where you can constrain the VM vCPU count (to one half or one quarter of the original VM size) to reduce the cost of SQL Server licensing, while maintaining the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth as a non-constrained VM. These constrained Azure VMs have a suffix in the name that indicates the number of active vCPUs in the VM.

Click through for the comparison.

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Persistent Memory for SQL Server on Linux

The SQL Server team shows how you can configure persistent memory for SQL Server on Linux:

With the release of SQL Server 2019 on Linux, Microsoft introduced persistent memory (PMEM) support on Linux. This is an exciting development, as previous versions of SQL Server on Linux didn’t support PMEM. Let’s look at how to configure the PMEM for SQL Server on Linux.

SQL Server 2016 introduced support for non-volatile DIMMs and an optimization called Tail of the Log Caching on NVDIMM. These leveraged Windows Server direct access to a persistent memory device in DAX mode to reduce the number of operations needed to harden a log buffer to persistent storage.

SQL Server 2019 extends the support for PMEM devices to Linux, providing full enlightenment of data and transaction logs placed on PMEM. Enlightenment is a way to access the storage device using efficient user-space memcpy() operations. Rather than going through the file system and storage stack, SQL Server leverages DAX support on Linux to place data directly into the device. This helps to reduce latency.

Click through for the configuration steps.

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On Quantum Supremacy

John Cook has some thoughts on Google’s quantum supremacy announcement:

Google announced today that it has demonstrated “quantum supremacy,” i.e. that they have solved a problem on a quantum computer that could not be solved on a classical computer. Google says

Our machine performed the target computation in 200 seconds, and from measurements in our experiment we determined that it would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to produce a similar output.

IBM disputes this claim. They don’t dispute that Google has computed something with a quantum computer that would take a lot of conventional computing power, only that it “would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years” to solve. IBM says it would take 2.5 days.

If you want to jump the gun but also stay on the Microsoft stack, the Q# programming language is open-source and you can run a simulator on your machine. Manning also has a Q# book in the works.

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