SQL

Working With Tags in FlashArray using PowerShell

Introduction Purity is the operating environment that runs Pure Storage products like FlashArray and Cloud Block Store. Starting in Purity 6.0, you can assign tags to objects. This post shows you how to perform some basic tagging operations for volumes. What’s a Tag and Why Do I Care? A tag is a key/value pair that can be attached to an object in FlashArray, like a volume or a snapshot. Using tags enables you to attach additional metadata to objects for classification, sorting, and searching.

Running SQL Server on Apple Silicon - Updated

Last week I purchased a shiny new MacBook Air with an M2 processor. After I got all the standard stuff up and running, I set out to learn how to run SQL Server containers on this new hardware. This post shows you how to run SQL Server on Apple Silicon using colima. Colima is a container runtime that runs a Linux VM on your Mac. This Linux VM runs using the Virtualization framework hypervisor native in MacOS.

Pre-Conference Workshop and Sessions at PASS Summit

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting at this year’s PASS Summit. PASS Data Community Summit 2022 is the year’s largest gathering of data platform professionals in the US. This year I have a pre-conference workshop, a regular session, and a Learning Path session. Let’s dive into each. Pre-Conference Workshop: Become a Hybrid Architect My good friend Ben E. Weissman and I will teach a pre-conference workshop called “Become a Hybrid Architect” in this workshop we will cover the foundations needed to design and build a hybrid cloud strategy for your organization.

Setting up SQL Server 2022 s3 Object Storage Integration using MinIO with Docker Compose

In this blog post, I’ve implemented two example environments for using SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integration. One for backup and restore to s3 compatible object storage and the other for data virtualization using Polybase connectivity to s3 compatible object storage. This work aims to get you up and running as quickly as possible to work with these new features. I implemented this in Docker Compose since that handles all the implementation and configuration steps for you.

Setting up MinIO for SQL Server 2022 s3 Object Storage Integration

Introduction In this post, I will walk you through how to set up MinIO, so you can use it to work with SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integrations. Working with s3 and SQL Server requires a valid and trusted TLS certificate. This can be a pain for some users and environments. So I’m writing this post so you can get off the ground running with this new feature set in SQL Server 2022.

Backing up to s3 Compatible Object Storage with SQL Server

Introducing S3 in SQL Server 2022 S3 compatible object storage integration is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2022. There are two significant areas where SQL Server leverages this: backup and restore and data virtualization. This article will focus on getting started with using S3 compatible object storage for backups. Now let’s unpack that phrase ‘S3 compatible object storage’ a bit. AWS Simple Cloud Storage Service (S3) is a storage service AWS provides in their cloud.

Seeding an Availability Group Replica from Snapshot

Background If you’ve been using Availability Groups, you’re familiar with the replica seeding (sometimes called initializing, preparing or data sychronization) process. Seeding is a size of data operation, copying data from a primary replica to one or more secondary replicas. This is required before joining a database to an Availability Group. You can seed a replica with backup and restore or automatic seeding, each with its own challenges. Regardless of which method you use, the seeding operation can take a long amount of time.

I'm Speaking at SQLBits 2022!

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQLBits! I had the absolute pleasure of speaking at SQLBits in the past, both in person and virtual, and experienced first hand how great this event is and cannot wait to get back and speak again (in person)! And this year, I have several sessions with some of my best friends on our data community!!! One on building and deploying container based applications in Kubernetes and the other on deploying SQL Server in Kubernetes

SQL Server on Physical Machine Best Practices

The intent of this post is a quick reference guide based on the recommendations made on Pure Storage Support page in the Microsoft Platform Guide. The target audience for this blog post is for SQL Server DBAs introducing them to the most impactful configurations and settings for running SQL Server on physical machines on Pure Storage. Physical Host Configuration Check with your hardware vendor to see if they publish a guide for SQL Server-specific configurations for their server platforms.

Measuring SQL Server File Latency

This post is a reference post for retrieving IO statistics for data and log files in SQL Server. We’ll look at where we can find IO statistics in SQL Server, query it to produce meaningful metrics, and discuss some key points when interpreting this data. The Source DMF The primary source for file latency data is the dynamic management function sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats. The data in this DMF is per file. The query below joins with sys.