Cloud – Convergence of Data and Infrastructure

SQL Live Conference – December 2-7 in Orlando

Best Practices, Cloud, Events, Professional Development, SQL Server No Responses »

Nov 192018

I am proud to contribute to this year’s Live360 conference, to be held in Orlando Florida at the Royal Pacific Resort at Universal from December 2nd to 7th.

I’ll be presenting two sessions at this conference. The first is Thursday in room SQH01 called “Cosmos DB for SQL Server Pros” at 8:00am.

Microsoft’s Cosmos DB is the first globally distributed database service, allowing low-latency scalability across multiple geographical regions. As a SQL Server pro, why does this matter? SQL Server is a great multi-function database that can handle many of your tasks with ease. However, it’s not the only tool in the toolbox, and Cosmos DB is a tremendous alternative for some use cases. This introductory session explores Cosmos DB and walks you through the similarities and differences in the two platforms. We explore how to provision and design your database, insert sample data and query for specific records. We’ll review the scalability and throughput settings, and help you ramp up your DBA and development skills on this compelling new platform.

You will learn:

The core concepts of Cosmos DB and the reasons to consider it for data requirements
Key concepts around data design, placement and document construction
How to query for data and process client-side

Just after this session completes on Thursday, the next session is called “Level Up Your SQL Server Cloud Skills” in room SQLH05 at 9:30am.

Think infrastructure in the cloud is still just for sysadmins? Think again! As your organization moves into the cloud, infrastructure architecture skills are more important than ever for DBAs to master. Expert knowledge of cloud-related infrastructure will help you maintain performance and availability for databases in the cloud. For example, know what an IOP is? Should you use a Database as a Service or provision a cloud-based virtual machine? How many compute resources does your database consume during a given day? Can you secure it properly? Come learn many of the key cloud infrastructure points that you should master as the DBA role continues to evolve!

You will learn:

To identify key concepts around database platform selection, such as Azure SQL DB versus Infrastructure as a Service, and make educated recommendations for the appropriate platform
To identify key performance metrics, such as storage performance, vCPU/DTU requirements and so on, that help with properly sizing the destination resources
About Identifying and recognizing the key reasons to migrate databases to the cloud versus keeping them on-premises

PASS Summit Cosmos DB Demo Code

Cloud, Events, Performance, Personal, Professional Development, SQL Server, Technology, User Groups No Responses »

Nov 092018

As part of the PASS Summit conference session that Bob Pusateri and I are presenting right now called “Cosmos DB for SQL Server Pros“, we are demonstrating a number of Azure Cosmos DB features that we feel strongly about helping you leverage through code. As a result, all of the code that we’re demonstrating today is now available for you to download and explore.

This code demonstrates how to collect Windows Perfmon metrics with C#, package them up into a Cosmos DB document, insert the document into Cosmos DB, and then fetch and query individual and multiple documents based on a SQL-like interface demonstration.

As always, there’s no warranty with this code, please don’t distribute as your own, yada yada yada. I’m not the best programmer, so if anyone has improvements, I’d love to have you send me your updates to check out!

PASS Summit 2018 Activities

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, Virtualization No Responses »

Nov 062018

What a whirlwind year this has been! I’m thrilled to invite you to my sessions at this year’s PASS Summit, happening this week in Seattle WA.

Tuesday 11:30am to 1:00pm I’m part of the cloud availability panel over lunch at the SentryOne Data Day precon at the Summit. I hope you already registered for this exciting opportunity to learn more about performance and availability-related topics in this whole-day discussion.

Next, for those of you that still have your mission-critical workloads in your on-premises datacenter (or even for those who have them in the cloud, because almost all of the topics directly apply!), come to my session Wednesday morning at 10:45am entitled “On-Prem SQL Servers, Interstellar Performance“. This deep-dive on virtual SQL Server performance will help you squeeze the most performance from your virtualized SQL Servers, and will help you communicate with your infrastructure team on things that matter the most to performance-oriented SQL Servers. You’ll be sure to have quite a bit of real-world tips and tricks to take back to the office as soon as you return from the conference.

Thursday morning I’m part of the SIOS PASS the Bacon breakfast panel, where we’ll get a good chuckle while we discuss a number of topics pertinent to today’s DBA, such as availability both on-prem and in the cloud, disaster mitigation and preparation, and other availability topics. Come register here, get a great breakfast on the house, and learn while you laugh!

Next, Bob Pusateri and I have a session Thursday afternoon called “SELECT STARS: A SQL DBA’s Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB”, where we discuss and present Microsoft’s new Cosmos DB offering on the Azure platform. This platform is a completely different model of databases than what most SQL Server professionals are accustomed to, and we’ll give you the details you need to expand your horizons and learn about this exciting platform. This session is more of the ‘what’ session to get you amped to learn more about the platform on Friday.

Friday my final session of the conference is entitled “Cosmos DB for SQL Server Pros”, designed to give you more of the ‘how’ when continuing your exploration of Cosmos DB. Bob Pusateri and I will share more of the use cases, scalability details, and live code demos of how to access and alter data in a Cosmos DB database.

I hope to see you at the show! If you want to sync up and talk geek, make sure to ping me to set up some time over your favorite form of caffeine.

SQL Saturday Lincoln Precon this Friday Oct 26

Best Practices, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server No Responses »

Oct 232018

I’m presenting an exciting preconference training session on Friday, October 26, ahead of the SQL Saturday in Lincoln, Nebraska. This all-day training class, entitled “Level Up Your Cloud Infrastructure Skills“, is designed to help you, the SQL Server professional, ramp up your knowledge so you know how to better manage workloads in the cloud.

Think infrastructure in the cloud is still just for sysadmins? Think again! As your organization moves into the cloud, infrastructure skills are more important than ever for DBAs to master. Expert knowledge of cloud-related infrastructure will help you maintain performance and availability for databases in the cloud. For example, know what an IOP is? How many does your database consume during a given day? Properly sizing a cloud database depends on your knowledge of this metric. Failure to properly configure storage performance at the time of deployment will slow down your SQL Server considerably. Come learn many of the key cloud infrastructure points that you should master as the DBA role continues to evolve in this all-day boot camp on ramping up your knowledge on cloud management!

RSVP for this exciting preconference training session here for just $135! Seats are limited, so register soon!

VMworld 2018 SQL Server Sessions

Best Practices, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Technology, Virtualization No Responses »

Jul 242018

I hope to see you all at this year’s VMworld 2018 USA conference where I’m lucky enough to have been selected to present four SQL Server-themed sessions!

The first is an all-day boot camp (VAP3768WU) with Oleg Ulyanov from VMware Corp. where we take participants through a comprehensive journey of understanding how to manage, performance tuning, and business continuity planning for high performance SQL Servers on the VMware virtualization platform. It’s the Sunday before VMworld officially ramps up, and if you have infrastructure engineers attending this conference, please tell them to register for this boot camp.

Next, Thomas LaRock from SolarWinds (@sqlrockstar) and I will be presenting a session called “Performance Deep Dive for Demanding Virtual Database Servers” (VAP1425BU). We’ll be discussing advanced performance-related topics such as CPU scheduling and vNUMA, “right-sizing” for both performance and licensing, virtual disks and performance discrepancies, and general operational efficiency.

Next, Michael Corey from LicenseFortress (@michael_corey) and I will be presenting a session called “Database Virtualization (Monster VMs) with VMware vSphere: Doing IT Right” (VAP1296BU), which is an updated version of our continued track of performance-related tips and tricks. Come see us laugh our way through over a hundred slides packed full of things you can take back to your environments!

Finally, I have a solo session called “Database vDisks and You” (VMTN5520B), where I’ll talk about all of the various layers of queueing between the SQL Server database and the enterprise SAN, and how to measure and monitor these layers, plus discuss ways to performance tune each layer.

As always, it’s going to be a great show! Ping me if you want to meet up in person while at the show, and let’s geek out and talk shop! Register for this conference here, and make sure to enroll in the SQL Server on VMware boot camp!

SQL Server on VMware Boot Camp at VMworld 2018

Best Practices, Business, Cloud, Events, Performance, Professional Development, SQL Server, Storage, Virtualization 1 Response »

Jul 212018

I am extremely proud to announce that I am presenting in conjunction with VMware Corp. an all-day boot camp for advanced SQL Server operations, performance tuning, and business continuity strategies at this year’s VMworld 2018 USA in Las Vegas on Sunday, August 26th, at the Mandalay Bay conference center.

Oleg Ulyanov from VMware Corp. and I are teaming up together to present this all-day intensive workshop.

Workshop Abstract: Learn the essential skills necessary to run SQL Server implementations on VMware vSphere. VMware expert Oleg Ulyanov will be joined by Microsoft MVP David Klee from Heraflux to cover best practices and optimal approaches to deployment, operation, and management of SQL Server on VMware vSphere. This technical workshop delivers real-life, instructor-led, live training and incorporates the recommended design and configuration practices for architecting business-critical databases on VMware vSphere infrastructure. Subjects covered in depth will include performance, monitoring , high availability and disaster recovery with failover cluster instances or availability groups, and advanced storage architectures.

Register for this exciting workshop as part of your VMworld conference admission ASAP, as seats are filling up! SQL Server is not an easy application to manage in any environment, so come learn many real-world tips and tricks for making these databases run as fast and smooth as possible.

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