One of the only things platform as a service databases like Azure SQL Database do not do for you is actively manage column and index statistics. While backups, patches, and even integrity checks are built into the platform services, managing your metadata is not. Since Azure SQL Database lacks a SQL Sever Agent for scheduling, […]
Category: Cloud
New Features in Cloud Shell in the Azure Portal
One of the things that was really painful in the early days of Azure, especially for those of us who are consultants with many customers, was the process of switching tenants and logged in sessions. To Microsoft’s credit, they have made this process much better, it’s a single click to switch between logins and/or subscriptions. […]
Storage Field Day 19 MinIO #SFD19
In January I had the chance to attend Storage Field Day 19 in Santa Clara, where we got to meet with a wide variety of startups and large enterprise storage companies. One of the more interesting companies we meet with was MinIO which has a really interesting and compelling object-based storage product. I’ve talked about […]
Storage Field Day 19–Western Digital #SFD19
As I mentioned in my post last week I recently had the opportunity to attend Storage Field Day 19, where I got to meet with a wide variety of storage software and hardware companies in Silicon Valley. One of the more interesting companies we met with was a longtime player in storage—Western Digital. (Disclosure—I own […]
Storage Field Day 19–Current State of the Storage Industry #SFD19
Last week I got to spend some time meeting with numerous storage companies in Silicon Valley. I along with another dozen or so delegates met with companies large and small, including Western Digital, Dell EMC, NetApp, and startups like MinIO. I’ll be writing posts in coming weeks to talk about some of the interesting technology […]
My SQL Saturday Chicago Precon: Leveling Up Your Azure Skills
I’m doing another precon at SQL Saturday Chicago on March 20th, 2020. The event is at Benedictine University in Lisle, IL. This time we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into Azure. While last years precon focused on basic infrastructure skills in Azure, this time we’re going to focus a little deeper into the […]
Really, Really Fast Cloud Storage
For a long time, CPUs and memory got faster, but we were stuck with spinning disks that topped out at 15,000 RPM. We got SSDs which were orders of magnitude faster, but we were still ultimately limited by controller throughput. NVME changes all of that. Do you know what NVME storage is? If you don’t, […]
Azure SQL Analytics—Automating Deployment
One of the cool feature additions to Azure SQL Database is Azure SQL Analytics, an additional feature that connects your Azure SQL Database to Azure Log Analytics. You can use this in conjunction with Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools. Once this is configured you can see all […]
Vendors: Tell Me What Your Product Costs
A couple of weeks ago, my friend and colleague Matthew Roche (t), put out a poll about people’s feelings about vendors who don’t publicly advertise the costs associated with their products. In the past, in a disconnected world, when most of your customers had sales reps, and being able to find all of your competitors […]
How the Cloud Democratizes Solutions
The grey hairs I see every now and again remind me of how long I’ve been working in IT. I’m now in my 22nd year of having a job (2 years as an intern, but I did have the ‘sys’ password), and I’ve seen a lot of things come and go. When I started working […]