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Category: Virtualization

Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers and fdw_tuple_cost

Published 2024-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Umair Shahid provides background info on a recent change:

“Why is DEFAULT_FDW_TUPLE_COST so insanely low?”

That was the subject of the email thread initiated by David Rowley to discuss this topic. I found the subject line amusing, accurate, and fully descriptive of the problem at hand. The discussion resulted in a commit that changed the default value from 0.01 to 0.2. Because I had previously written about postgres_fdw and also mentioned fdw_tuple_cost, I figured it would be good to go deeper into what this parameter is about and why it makes sense to default it to 0.2.

Read on to learn more about Foreign Data Wrappers (the Postgres equivalent to PolyBase in SQL Server), tuple costing, and more.

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Distributed Data in Postgres

Published 2023-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Umair Shahid explains how postgres_fdw works:

Bridging Data Silos and Accelerating Insights

In today’s data-driven world, organizations often grapple with data residing in multiple, disparate databases. This fragmentation can hinder seamless analysis and decision-making. However, PostgreSQL offers a powerful tool to address this challenge: postgres_fdw.

What is postgres_fdw?

postgres_fdw, short for PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper, is a built-in extension that allows you to seamlessly access and query data stored in external PostgreSQL databases as if it were local to your current database. This means you can create views, join tables, and perform complex queries across multiple databases without the need for manual data integration or replication.

Read on for more information about the extension.

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Moving VMs and Disks between Azure Tenants

Published 2023-11-02 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres makes a move:

Move objects on Azure is not simple. Move between Tenants is extremely difficult or not possible. I faced the challenge to move a virtual machine and disks between tenants recently and found the solution.

Some Years ago, I wrote an article about the Azure Resource Mover when it was still being created. Today the resource mover is integrated with the entire azure portal, although there are already many limitations in relation to moving resources. Anyway, this will not affect us on this blog post.

Click through for the step-by-step, as well as a few gotchas you might run into along the way.

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SQL Server on VMware Accelerator YouTube Series

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee has a series for us:

My SQL Server on VMware Accelerator boot camp video series is now live on Youtube! There’s no strings attached and no price of entry, so now there’s no reason why you can’t join me in this adventure to learn more about how to performance and availability tune your SQL Server on VMware data estate.

Eyeballing this, it comes in at about 8 hours of content. And if you want to learn all about virtualization of SQL Server, I’m not sure there’s a better person to learn from than David.

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Finding SQL Server Installation Media on Azure VMs

Published 2023-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Pusateri does a search:

I was recently wanting to test out some PolyBase features in SQL Server. Azure being my test environment of choice these days, I spun up an Azure SQL Virtual Machine, but I quickly found that PolyBase wasn’t installed. To add it I would need the install media of course, but how does one get that in an Azure SQL Virtual Machine?

Everybody should test out PolyBase, but that’s because I’m wildly biased. Anyhow, Bob shows us where we can find the installation media.

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Changes to the IaaS Agent for SQL Server on Azure VMs

Published 2023-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Aditya Badramraju has an announcement:

SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is powered by the SQL IaaS Agent extension which provides many features that make managing your SQL Server easy. This blog will discuss new features and changes we’ve recently released in this extension. 

Click through for those changes. I was prepared, upon seeing the “Retiring Modes” section, to have a cynical response about forcing everyone into what was effectively Full mode, but that proto-take ended up being way off base and the truth is much nicer.

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“No Healthy Upstream” Error in vCenter

Published 2023-01-24 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry diagnoses a problem:

Over the weekend, I was configuring our new VMware servers. I was happily working around when all of a sudden, vCenter started showing the hated “no healthy upstream” message on the vCenter website.

Thankfully, this was not the first time I’d seen this happen, and it usually occurs randomly (at least in my experience). The solution is easier than most people would think.

Click through to learn what you should do if you see that error.

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Running SQL Server on an M2 Processor

Published 2023-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

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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STONITH Resources for Pacemaker Clusters

Published 2022-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski picks up Chekov’s Gun:

Recently I had to create another pacemaker cluster, this time on-premises using VMWare virtual machines. The steps to create the pacemaker cluster and deploy an availability group where pretty much the same as in my original post (minus any Azure marlarkey) but one step was different, creating the STONITH resource.

A STONITH resource is needed in a pacemaker cluster as this is what prevents the dreaded split brain scenario…two nodes thinking that they’re the primary node. If the resource detects a failed node in the cluster it’ll restart that node, hopefully allowing it to come up in the correct state.

Read on to see how Andrew did it.

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