sql server
Omaha Azure User Group Presentation 2019.10.20
David Klee is proud to present to Omaha’s Microsoft Azure Users Group in a new session called “Everything you Need to Know about SQL Server in Azure“.
Session Details: Are you interested in moving your SQL Server workloads to the Azure public cloud? Where do you start? Do you pick Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, or do you need the full versatility (and overhead) of SQL Server in an Azure IaaS VM? How do you get your data there? How do you maintain performance and availability? How can you monitor it? All of these questions and more will be addressed in this interactive session. Bring your questions and let’s explore Azure SQL Server offerings together!
RSVP for this meeting at the user group Meetup site. We look forward to seeing you there!
Lincoln SQL Server Users Group 2019
David Klee is proud to present at the Lincoln Nebraska SQL Server Users Group on September 5th! Stay tuned for more details!
SQL Server Tuning Results in Cloud Licensing Reduction
We have a Client that recently expressed interest to make their SQL Servers more efficient so that they can establish a standardized scale-out model for their hosted software platform. The objective was to allow a certain number of ‘normal’ sized customers to coexist on the same SQL Server instance in a VM in the cloud. The challenging situation for this Client is that the licensing cost of a cloud-based SQL Server deployment was beginning to become cost prohibitive. The SQL Server usage patterns were pretty standard for an in-house developed software package, where the developers are great at what they do, but are not trained in SQL Server internals.
We did a tremendous amount of sampling with Windows Perfmon to get a baseline of resource consumption across what the Client would consider a business cycle. Check out the CPU consumption patterns by CPU core.
That’s a moderately active machine, and the concern was that if it became much more active, especially during the morning, they were not going to achieve the customer density per instance that they were looking for.
We went in and reviewed the infrastructure stack top to bottom, from the VM disk type and disk presentation all the way up to the SQL Server table and index structures, and the way that the application was querying for the data. Many of the items were fantastic and well managed, but a number of items (mostly platform default settings) were getting in the way of scalability. We accessed the system and tuned the following items without modifying anything that would require significant regression testing of the application.
- Multiple disk controllers and virtual disks, and better distributed the SQL Server objects to more appropriately load balance the OS-layer I/O queues
- Enabled Windows Receive Side Scaling for the network adapter to reduce the CPU concentration for network traffic handling
- Introduced SQL Server Read Committed Snapshot Isolation so that we can achieve better concurrency for read workloads within their databases
- Tuned the SQL Server parallelism settings (Cost Threshold of Parallelism and Max Degree of Parallelism) to better align the application demand with the CPU architecture
- Significant amounts of missing and unused index tuning within the customer databases, and created a standard tuning model to be used across all customers
After tuning for just one week and two maintenance windows, look at the next business cycle CPU activity pattern.
The difference is stark. The CPU consumption across all instances is much lower than before, and so low that based on the projections, they can handle double the customer load per instance on a cloud-based SQL Server instance size half of what they anticipated. Plus, performance dramatically improved for each click of the user in their web application.
The results are clear. The customer is able to improve their customer experience while chopping their deployed SQL Server virtual machine costs by over 75%. Immediately!
I’ll repeat that! The customer just needs to schedule a maintenance window for us to reconfigure the virtual machine. We can apply the indexes and other changes with only a brief interruption in service. Monitor the resource consumption until we see how the machine settles in. One more short interruption in service to change the resource assignments to the VM is all we need to start saving on the cloud deployment costs.
We can do this for your SQL Server databases and help you save on your associated cloud costs . Contact us to learn more!
David Klee Renewed as Microsoft MVP for 2019-2020
I am thrilled to announce that I have been renewed for the sixth time as a Microsoft Data Platform MVP for the calendar year of July 2019 to June 2020. The MVP award remains incredibly special to me, and I feel very lucky to be part of this program.
Congratulations to all new and renewed MVPs! Thanks Microsoft for awarding me this designation again this year. I’m thrilled to be a part of this community, and will continue to contribute to the technical communities around the world that I so dearly enjoy. I’m eager to contribute back to Microsoft to help make the data platform products stronger than ever and help people get the most out of them!
David Klee presenting at PASS Summit 2019
Heraflux is proud to announce that the founder David Klee is presenting at this year’s PASS Summit conference, to be held in Seattle WA from November 5th to 8th at the Washington State Convention Center.
David is presenting a full-day preconference training session called “Advanced Virtual SQL Server Performance“ as part of the Architecture stream.
Session Abstract: Virtualization is the new norm in datacenters. Even the ubiquitous “cloud” is nothing more than virtualized servers in someone else’s datacenter with advanced automation on top of it. However, just because it’s everywhere doesn’t mean it is implemented and managed correctly. Done incorrectly, your SQL Server performance can take a massive dive. Are your SQL Servers running at their best possible performance?
This full-day boot camp covers all aspects of performance engineering for virtualized SQL Servers. We will review critical topics such as virtualization layers, VM construction, NUMA, resource scheduling, query parallelization and physical server alignment, “right-sizing,” and storage performance-oriented presentation. Availability and disaster recovery guidelines will also be reviewed. Most importantly, this seminar informs you on methods and terminology to help you work better with your infrastructure team to streamline your critical SQL Server performance. You will understand how to review your critical SQL Servers for both their performance and availability as they relate to the virtualization and physical compute layers underneath, and work with your infrastructure team to implement and streamline any of your findings.
In addition to the preconference training day, David is presenting an abridged technical fire hose session on key topics in a session called “Virtual SQL Server Performance Deep Dive“. This session is designed to ramp up attendees on critical (and silent) performance killers in both cloud and on-premises virtual SQL Servers.
Session Abstract: Your business-critical SQL Servers should not suffer from virtualization-related bottlenecks. When properly architected and managed, the principal bottleneck of performance of these SQL Servers should be only limited by code. However, if not properly constructed, silent and seemingly random performance killers can strike and significantly hurt your database performance. Items such as CPU scheduling, storage queueing, and memory overcommitment can all penalize database performance, and are tough to identify.
This session is packed with many live examples of tips and tricks gained from years of experience in getting the most performance from your virtual SQL Servers. The major roadblocks to performance will be discussed, and tools, techniques, and processes will be demonstrated to help you measure and validate the system performance of the key components underneath your data.
If you’ve never attended the PASS Summit before, we urge you to go. This conference is the best Microsoft data-platform-centric conference there is, and the information you will gain is second to none. The people you meet networking lasts a lifetime. The content is guaranteed to improve your data platform operations. We won’t miss it, and we hope to see you there!
SQL Saturday Atlanta Precon May 17
I am very proud to announce that I have been selected to present an exciting preconference training session at this year’s SQL Saturday Atlanta on May 17th, 2019, called “Level Up Your Data Platform Cloud Infrastructure“. If you are in the cloud or even remotely considering it, I urge you to attend this session!
We also have a discount code for those interested. It’s PAPERJAM, and enter it at the EventBrite checkout page.
Designed to help people that are starting to consider cloud for their data platforms ramp up quickly on all of the items that they need to hit the ground running and make the best choices while selecting and using the platform.
Session Abstract: While your on-premises infrastructure is likely maintained by another team, in the cloud this responsibility falls on you. Whether your organization is just planning for the cloud, all-in, or leveraging a hybrid architecture, this course is designed to ramp you up on maximizing your investment in the cloud components that you utilize.
Infrastructure skills are essential when managing your environment in the cloud. Knowledge is power; key items such as firewalls and connectivity, storage presentation and performance, baselining, and even platform selection are all necessary areas of concern. Capacity management is also crucial, as the old ways of “throwing hardware” at a performance problem will translate into a larger bill each month.
Attend this session to learn how to efficiently manage cloud resources, set yourself apart from your peers, improve the performance of your mission-critical workloads, and potentially save your employer money!
SentryOne announces SQL Sentry Essentials
Today SentryOne, one of the few SQL Server monitoring platforms that we are proud to stand behind, announced a new version of their monitoring platform called SQL Sentry Essentials. It’s for monitoring SQL Server environments at a smaller scale, and provides a good balance of features that these platforms need without the overhead of unnecessary features that these organizations do not need. Read their full press release here and if you’re interested in exploring this platform, contact us for an introduction!
Live360 Conference 2018
Heraflux is extremely proud to announce our involvement in this year’s SQL Server Live conference, part of the Live360 conference, in Orlando Florida from December 2 – 7.
David Klee is presenting a number of SQL Server, infrastructure, and virtualization-themed sessions. Stay tuned for more details!
Live360 2018 Conference
Heraflux is 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.
David Klee is 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
Register for this exciting conference today! We look forward to seeing you there!
PASS Summit 2018
Heraflux is thrilled to announce our contributions to this year’s PASS Summit to be held in Seattle, WA held November 6-9th at the Washington Conference Center.
Both David Klee and Bob Pusateri are presenting sessions this year. Stay tuned for more details!