SQL Server 2022 introduces a new feature to enable application-consistent snapshot backups. TSQL Snapshot Backups enable the SQL Server to control the database quiesce without external tools. Using TSQL Snapshot backups enables instantaneous restores, independent of the size of data, for a database, group, or server backups, including point-in-time recovery.

When you use this feature, it freezes I/O. You’ll see a record like this in your error log when you execute the command ALTER DATABASE TestDB1 SET SUSPEND_FOR_SNAPSHOT_BACKUP = ON. This blog post will show you that the I/O freeze is just for write operations. You can continue to read from the database during this frozen state.

Welcome back to the third installment of our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this post, we’ll learn how to retrieve performance data from FlashArray and Cloud Block Store. Here, you’ll uncover the intricacies of extracting performance data across several object types, including Volumes and Hosts. We will dig into the object model that exposes crucial performance insights. Moreover, we’ll delve into the realm of performance analysis, addressing common customer questions such as:

Welcome back to the second installment of our series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this post, we’ll dive into working with object data using Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2.

When it comes to manipulating data in PowerShell, the ability to effortlessly pipe objects and their associated data between cmdlets is a game-changer. However, when it comes to Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2, there’s an even more efficient way to handle this. By tapping into the REST API of your FlashArray and Cloud Block Store, you can significantly reduce the runtime of your cmdlet executions. This can be achieved by leveraging key functions such as sort, limit, and filter.

Welcome to our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this series, we will provide you with practical insights and examples on how to harness the power of the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2 to enhance your storage management capabilities.

Throughout this series, we will cover a wide range of topics, including performance data gathering, snapshot management, performance bottleneck identification, and resource management within your FlashArray and Cloud Block Store. I will guide you step by step, making complex tasks easier to understand and execute.

In this blog post, I will show you how to build a hello world container-based web application in the go programming language. The reason I want to do this is because I need a very small container image to do some testing in Kubernetes. I’ll also highlight some of the pitfalls I ran into to hopefully have you some time in your learnings.

Let’s build and test it locally first

Before you build a container-based application, you need an application. So let’s go ahead and build a simple hello world app in go, but running on our local system as a traditionally compiled program. I want to make sure my application works before I move onto the container build process. You’ll need to install the go programming language development tools. On a Mac, you can do that with brew install go. For other operating systems, check out the install page.

My new course “Securing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Clusters”, co-authored with my good friend and colleague Ben E. Weissman, is now available on Pluralsight here! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer here, or if you’re going to dive right in, check it out here!

This course completes the learning path, Managing and Orchestrating Containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), that Ben and I built together.

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. For example, you can assign a tag to a collection of volumes and then come along later and retrieve a listing of volumes that match a particular key or value. You can use tags to add application context to resources inside FlashArray. Specifically, in the examples in this blog post, I want to tag volumes with the names SQL Server Instances.

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. Your containers will run inside this virtual machine.

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.

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. The certificate we’re working with here is self-signed. You could get a real certificate for your environment, and that’s encouraged. But this walk-through intends to get you up and running fast so that you can test out SQL Server’s s3 object integrations. We’re using MinIO’s free GNU AGPL v3 edition and running it in a docker container for our s3 compatible object storage and SQL Server 2022 CTP 2.0, which is also running in a container.