Featured Article(s)
New Features in ADO.NET (Part III)
ADO.NET has introduced many cool features to improve the scalability and performance of data centric applications. With features like provider independent factory models, support for XQuery handling with xml data type and asynchronous processing techniques, the amount of LOC, code complexity and maintenance has been greatly reduced thus helping the developers to be more productive. In this series of articles, we will explore the new features added to ADO.NET.
Have You Seen the Free Software Directory at SSWUG.ORG?
Currently featuring DataLinks for MS Access – Productivity tools for database developers – DataLinks for Access only query tool allows business and IT users to quickly and easily access their Access databases. Writes SQL, easiest UI on the market today with simple preview data review. Data direct to Excel or XML on the fly and easily create live links. Excel based data access, integration, query, plus dashboards and reporting.
In The New Year…
I don’t know if you know about it, but the email discussions here on SSWUG are some of the most active and comprehensive in the world. If you have SQL Server questions, or if you want to help out others or even just lurk and learn, the email discussion lists are an *excellent* way to do so. It’s open access to absolutely everyone and you can ask just about any question and one or more of the already 800 people on the lists is sure to have answers and help. You can offer up help on things you’ve seen, and you can learn from the community as you monitor the lists. Get started here.
Virtualization Feedback
Josh wrote in with his experiences with virtualization: "Virtualizing SQL server in a development environment is a good use of resources; however, trying to virtualize SQL in a production environment when performance is critical is not an effective use of resources. Particularly if you have multiple VM’s on a single physical server. Every environment is different so take my findings with a grain of salt, and be sure to test your own environment fully before switching to or away from virtual machines for SQL Server.
The company where I used to work decided to employee virtual machines as a cost savings approach in our QA environment. The number of servers we need to duplicate our production site was growing, and it was becoming cost prohibitive to maintain two (this was company policy to have two QA environments one which mirrored production and one which was the next version going out) environments. We had great success Virtualizing the web and application tier servers; however, the database servers were a different story.
We had two SQL servers that replicated slowly changing reference data (The data changed daily) between the two servers. Both SQL servers had their own VM, and were hosted on a single physical host. The host had a local drive and if memory serves a single Drive Controller (A whole other story can be told about why Sys Admins should not be dictate hardware for database servers) running Raid 5. Our process which modified the data took about 20 minutes to run and resulted in roughly 3 GB of data which would have to be replicated to the server. The replication ended up taking nearly 15 hours, and essentially made the SQL server unresponsive.
One argument I hear constantly for Virtualizing SQL server is that you can just copy out the virtual machine or move it to a different host; however, if your goal of Virtualizing is fault tolerance then there are better solutions such as blade servers or setting up a cluster.
I am sure there are ways with enough hardware to setup an efficient virtual server. With the appropriate disk controllers, and if you partition off enough of the physical resources, but I question again what the benefit is by going thought the effort versus dedicating a single server. "
…and Henry wrote in with this counter-point: "I have to say I’m sorry you’ve been using Microsoft Virtual Server as in my experience it is NOT a viable platform for any mission critical application especially SQL server.
VMWare is the virtualization platform of choice. We have more than 60 virtualized SQL 2000 & 2005 servers with no real "isolation of resources" as you put it.
The average SQL 2005 server deployment with more than 500 users only needs 1GB of RAM in VMWare ESX. Our blades are dual quad cores with 16GB of memory. The virtual server, even during peak operating hours never uses more than 50% of its entitled resources."
What do you think? Are you using VMWare? MS VS? Neither? Why? Email me here, let me know.
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The Why, What and How of Migrating Lotus Notes Applications
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