Yes, it happens. Things happen, systems fail, someone trips over a cable (hopefully not so much these days in major data centers), etc. What has struck me though is that your options for dealing with downtime when you’re hosting (and it doesn’t matter if it’s “stretch” services or hybrid or entirely cloud) in these types of services, are limited. If […]
Author: Stephen Wynkoop
False Sense of Security from Vendor
There’s been an interesting trend lately in several different sales calls where you’re walking through the software capabilities, listing out the different goals you have for the project, etc. The customer (be they internal or external) eventually gets around to infrastructure and how you’ve architected the solution. Now, if it’s on-premise, this leads to a lengthy discussion (why is it […]
Search Skills and Approaches for SQL Server (and other platforms)
One of the things that I suspect many companies are working through is the issue of information. As in, too much of a good thing makes it harder to get the good stuff out of the good thing. If there’s any trend that’s apparent on content sites like the (traditionally magazine) article sites and even internal databases that have information […]
The Cloud Does, Indeed, Not Fix Everything
Yesterday the post was about possibly using a move of servers to help ferret out things to review in your architecture (and not using it as a chance to necessarily block access that may have been lost control of). There was a good point made in the comments – John said “Those DTUs will kill your wallet if you don’t […]
Sometimes, You Have to Play Fireman
I’ve been working with several people as they re-architect their SQL Server systems to use their hybrid or cloud-first providers for their systems. In each case of this example, they’re currently entirely on-premises with their systems and are moving to the other types of platforms. What’s odd, at least to me, is that one of the reasons for the move […]
Important Lessons/Reminders for SQL Server Performance
The post yesterday about moving one of our SQL Servers to RDS and a dedicated instance and all of that (read more here) was a(nother) reminder that sometimes you have to take a step back and start with the easy stuff prior to assuming you need to do the complex modifications to your system to get the results you want. […]
Surprising Results, Moving SQL Server to RDS
We’ve recently moved a heavily used SQL Server instance from a VM-based installation to an RDS (Amazon, SaaS) solution. The server instance was not dedicated (don’t get me started) and, under load, would feel the pain of that type of installation. We would see loading that would approach 90% with frequent spikes to 100% depending on what was happening, jobs, […]
Do Big Data-Type Projects Succeed More Often?
It used to be said that IT projects (and since SQL Server is my focus, SQL Server database projects by inference), would fail an astronomically large percentage of the time. This was because, in most cases, of scope changing so frequently, particularly during development in a “waterfall” style project approach that had an extended calendar and fixed endpoints for functionality […]
Legacy Systems are a Liability
In the past couple of years, it’s come up several times that legacy systems are a challenge to manage… no surprise there. But what follows that conversation may be surprising – many times companies will take that first step, and decide that legacy systems are actually a liability. That they’re something that should be removed, gutted, replaced if at all possible. […]
Vendor Lock-In, Database Lock-In and Lots of Database Platforms
I was reading a great post about the different things going on with database platforms, talking about the notion that companies will typically have multiple database platforms. There have been posts on SSWUG about that in the past (and I’m sure in the future as well), specifically that there are so many platform options and the pros and cons of some […]