My new course “Deploying and Managing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Networking” 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!

Azure Kubernetes Service is a platform-as-a-service that provides Kubernetes Services in the Azure Cloud. This course will teach you to design, configure, and manage networking, services, and disaster recovery in Azure Kubernetes Service.

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. The time it takes to seed a replica is based on the size of the database, the speed of the network, and storage. If you have multiple replicas seeding all of them is N times the fun!

My updated course “Configuring and Managing Kubernetes Security” 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 will teach you the fundamentals needed to configure and manage security in Kubernetes clusters.

This course targets IT professionals who design and maintain Kubernetes and container-based solutions. The course can be used by the IT pro learning new skills and the system administrator or developer preparing to use Kubernetes both on-premises and in the Cloud.

My updated course “Maintaining, Monitoring and Troubleshooting Kubernetes” 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 will teach you to maintain, monitor, and troubleshoot production Kubernetes clusters.

This course targets IT professionals who design and maintain Kubernetes and container-based solutions. The course can be used by the IT pro learning new skills and the system administrator or developer preparing to use Kubernetes both on-premises and in the Cloud.

I’m super proud to announce that Ben E. Weissman and I have published Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services Revealed - Second Edition available now at Apress and your favorite online booksellers! Buy the book now or keep reading below if you need to be more convinced :)

A couple of notes about the book first, I enjoyed working with this bleeding-edge tech and collaborating with the SQL Server Engineering Team at Microsoft on this. I want to call out the support from the Azure Arc Enabled Data Services Program Manager at Microsoft, Jes Schultz. Thanks for your support and a fantastic forward. I also want to call out my co-author and friend, Ben; you are an excellent writer. Thank you for including me in this adventure!

At work, I get to work with some fantastic tech that pushes the boundaries of performance. I needed to do some performance testing from a Windows server into a FlashBlade using s3. I reached out to a colleague of mine, Joshua Robinson, who told me about s5cmd. s5cmd is a very fast, parallel s3 compatible command-line client.

Check out Joshua’s post for some performance numbers. Here’s a direct quote from his post.

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

My updated course “Configuring and Managing Kubernetes Storage and Scheduling” 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 teaches you how to decouple state and configuration from your Pod’s lifecycle using persistent storage and configuration as data and how to schedule Pods to Nodes in your Kubernetes cluster.

This blog post shows you how NTFS stores data, what the NTFS Allocation Unit means, and how SQL Server performs IOs of variable size.

How NTFS Stores Data on Disk

A Master File Table (MFT) is the data structure that describes files and directories on NTFS. In Figure 1, you can see an MTF record has several sections describing the metadata about the file and pointers to blocks that make up the file. A block, also referred to as a cluster in Windows, is an abstraction over one or more physical structures (sectors or pages depending on the media) presented by the underlying disk. A block/cluster is also the atomic allocation unit from a file system and has a configurable size. On NTFS, this is referred to as the NTFS Allocation Unit Size and is a configurable attribute of the file system. By default, it is 4KB and can be as large as 2MB. Since a block is a unit of allocation, if a file is between 1 byte and the file system’s allocation unit size, it will take up exactly one block/cluster on the file system. As the file grows, more blocks/clusters are allocated to represent the file. The MFT data structure tracks which blocks make up a file. The block allocator of the file system will try to ensure blocks are physically adjacent on the disk and groups them together in runs.

In this post, we’re going to walk through configuring Active Directory authentication for SQL Server on Linux. We will start by joining the Linux server to the domain, configuring SQL Server on Linux to communicate to the domain, and then use adutil to create our AD users and set up Kerberos for SQL Server login authentication.

Before getting started

First, let’s get some environment requirements set. We’ll need an Active Directory domain, a Linux host to install SQL Server on, some DNS records for that host, and the DNS client on that host configured for our environment. Here are the settings I used in this walk-through.