23Apr 2014 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Azure Automation

Azure
I introduced Azure Automation in a previous post. I've spent some more time exploring it. There's a set of documentation available as I noted before. Unfortunately, reading through the full set of documentation, I have some criticisms to offer. The layout of the documentation goes through "Common runbook tasks" actually more or less laying things out as I did, inadvertently, I assure you, in my previous blog post. The problem with that, as I found in that post is, the administration of the runbooks seems fairly straightforward from the screens. But, you can't do a darned thing with any of it until you have a runbook . Further, you can't have a runbook until that thing has some code in it. And, the documentation doesn't include documentation about code. Instead,…
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16Apr 2014 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Microsoft Azure Automation

Azure
Microsoft just announced a new mechanism for managing your Azure resources, Automation. You can check out the documentation on it here. It's a mechanism to create runbooks using PowerShell that you can then combine with other runbooks inside a runbook, etc. Let's check it out. I'm doing everything you see here without consulting the documentation. I want to see how easy it is to put this stuff together. First, because it's still in preview, you have to sign up. Once you're accepted in the program, you get a new icon in your Management Portal. Next, you'll have to create an automation account. That's pretty straight forward. It's just a name, your selected region and the subscription you're putting it under. No immediate guidance on where, when or if the region matters that…
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25Mar 2014 by Grant Fritchey 12 Comments

Save Money On Your Training Server

Azure, T-SQL
You can spend less money. Some of us are lucky. We work for very large corporations who can easily set aside a spare desktop or even space on a rack for a server on which we can train. Others of us are not as lucky. We work for smaller organizations that have to be more careful with their money. Not only do we not get the extra machine to train on, but our laptops could be weak things that can't run two or more VMs. In this case, how can you go about learning stuff? Spend your own money? Sure, it's an option. There are some very cheap servers available out there that won't cost you even $1000 dollars to set up. And for pretty cheap you can buy some…
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21Mar 2014 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PASS DBA Virtual Chapter Talk

Azure, PASS
I almost forgot to tell you about the Database Administration Virtual Chapter meeting next week, March 26th, 2014. I'll be doing a talk about query tuning in Windows Azure SQL Database. It's a talk I've given before (it was in the top 10 at the PASS Summit last year). Come find out why you'll need to tune queries in WASD, the tools you get, and the glorious fact that you'll actually be actively saving your business money by tuning queries! Click here now to register.
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19Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

How to Set Up Managed Backups in SQL Server 2014

Azure
Earlier this week I introduced the concept of Managed Backups (and caused less of a turmoil than I thought I would). Now I want to show you how it works. It's really simple and quite well documented. Before you get to the, insanely simple, task of actually enabling Managed Backup, you will need to go through the prerequisites. First, and this should be obvious, but I'll state it, just in case, you need to set up an Azure storage account. That's so insanely straight forward that I'm not going to say more. Then, you have to set up encryption on your system. I used these commands to prep it: CREATE MASTER KEY ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = '$qlserver2012queryperformancetuning'; CREATE CERTIFICATE CloudDojoCert WITH SUBJECT = 'Backup Encryption Certificate'; Again, shouldn't have to…
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17Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Introducing Managed Backups in SQL Server 2014

Azure
Some of the new functionality of 2014 is straight forward, non-controversial and easily welcomed by the community. Think, updateable column store indexes. Some of the new functionality is going to raise an eyebrow or three (most of the time, not on one person, but you know the #sqlfamily, we have some interesting mutations represented). Think... managed backups. Now, why on earth would a process that takes backups for you, including log backups, does it automatically per a schedule and/or when data has changed sufficiently, stores it offsite for protection and is easy to set up and maintain going to cause so much controversy? Hey, I'm wrong, it won't, move along... Or, maybe, I'm right, and this is going to raise more than eyebrows. We're talking about surrendering control over your…
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11Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

SQL Server 2014 Backup to URL

Azure, T-SQL
I'm absolutely in love with the concept of being able to create a backup directly to a protected, off-site location. Yeah, you can spend all sorts of money on terribly wonderful technology to enable that within your enterprise. And if you have that kind of money, great. But, what if you're like most everyone else and you just want a little more protection without mortgaging the house? Let's take a look at one possibility, backup to URL. There have been ways to backup to hosted storage, whether it was DropBox, AWS or Azure blob storage, for quite a while. But, every method I tried out involved setting up some type of drive on your system. As soon as you had your K:\ drive mapped out to AWS or whatever, you…
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19Nov 2013 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Windows Azure Views

Azure
It's kind of fun to see Azure development artifacts on display. I've posted about them before, a couple of times. I'm starting to finally get systematized about the whole thing, just so I can see stuff as it changes rather than discover them by accident or get told about them by someone else. Here's a little query I'm running to see when system views were last modified: SELECT av.name, av.create_date, av.modify_date FROM sys.all_views AS av ORDER BY av.modify_date DESC; The most recent stack of changes are here: I'll keep an eye on them to see what I can spot about interesting new functionality. I also compared the listing of all views in Azure to those on a SQL Server 2012 instance and came up with a list of differences. These…
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05Nov 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

More Azure Goodies

Azure
Microsoft keeps sneaking little things under the door for Windows Azure SQL Database. This time it's a couple of new views, a system view and a Dynamic Management View (DMV); sys.resource_stats and sys.dm_operation_stats. But, I also learned another fun fact, not all this stuff rolls out at the same speed. For example, if I run sys.resource_stats on a database on a server located in the North Central US data center, the output looks like this: But, if I run the same query against the same view with a database in a data center in East Asia (I experiment with where I put things), it looks like this (click on it to expand it, probably want to do that into a second tab or window so you can refer to it…
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15Oct 2013 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Monitoring Structure Changes

Azure
Most everyone I know works with environments that are carefully controlled and structured. All changes go through rigorous testing and full documentation. Absolutely nothing happens in a production environment that hasn't been thought through, discussed, planned for and written down. But, there are a few, a very few, who work in a slightly different kind of environment that they refer to as "the real world." In this "real world" changes to a production environment can happen without approval, planning or testing. Scary, right? There's good news for these poor benighted souls. Red Gate is testing out a new piece of software called SQL Lighthouse. It's meant to monitor your systems for changes so that you know what has happened and when in case you don't have a good source control…
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