Posts

In this blog post we’re going to cover systemd, process exit codes and highlight how systemd reacts in certain exit conditions from SQL Server on Linux. My friend and SQL Server guru Argenis Fernandez – @dbargenis asked about this behavior on Twitter and I’ve been meaning to write this post, so here you go! Also, there’s a Connect item filed by Argenis on this here. Vote!

systemd Basics

Systemd is an initialization daemon, it’s job is to bring the system to usable state. Meaning, it’s responsible for the orderly starting of services on a Linux system. It does much more than that, in fact, one of it’s other core components is journald. Journald stores logging information from systemd units.

PASS Summit is right around the corner and I’ll be there speaking on Monitoring Linux Performance for the SQL Server Admin!

There’s a fantastic amount of SQL Server on Linux content available at Summit. I encourage you to attend one of these sessions. You’ll likely find me at all of these!

Wednesday – 11/1

• 3:15PM –  Inside SQL Server 2017 on Linux by Bob Ward

Thursday – 11/2

• 10:45AM – Linux Clustering for the SQL Server DBA by Allan Hirt
• 1:30PM – Linux for the SQL Server DBA—Getting Started with a New OS by Joey D’Antoni
• 4:45PM – Business Case for Deploying SQL Server on Linux by Victor Isakov

Friday – 11/3

• 8:00AM – Monitoring Linux Performance for the SQL Server Admin by Anthony Nocentino
• 9:30PM – SQL Server on Linux: DBA Focused Lessons Learned from Early Deployments by Denzil Ribeiro
• 3:30PM – Linux Administration for the SQL Server DBA by Bob Pusateri and David Klee

In this blog post we’re going to explore how SQL Server on Linux responds to external memory pressure. On Windows based SQL Server systems we’ve become accustomed to the OS signaling to SQL Server that there’s a memory shortage. When signaled, SQL Server will kindly start shrinking it’s memory caches, including the buffer pool, to maintain overall system stability and usability. We’ll that story is a little different in SQL Server on Linux…let’s look and see how SQL Server on Linux responds to external memory pressure

I’m proud to announce that I will be delivering two sessions at IT/Dev Connections in San Francisco! This is my second year at IT/Dev Connections, real content for IT pros!

Networking Internals for the SQL Server Professional

Tuesday, 10/24/2017: 1:15 pm – 2:30 pm

Room: Contiental 7

Abstract

Once data leaves your SQL Server do you know what happens or is the world of networking a black box to you? Would you like to know how data is packaged up and transmitted to other systems and what to do when things go wrong? Are you tired of being frustrated with the network team? In this session we introduce how data moves between systems on networks and TCP/IP internals. We’ll discuss real world scenarios showing you how your network’s performance impacts the performance of your SQL Server and even your recovery objectives.

My new course “LFCE: Linux Service Management – HTTP Services” in now available on Pluralsight here! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer here or if you want to dive right in check it out here!

This course targets IT professionals that design and maintain RHEL/CentOS based enterprises. It aligns with the Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator (LFCS) and Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) and also Redhat’s RHCSA and RHCE certifications. The course can be used by both the IT pro learning new skills and the senior system administrator preparing for the certification exam

Earlier this week Ned Otter (@NedOtter) brought up a question about Instant File Initialization on SQL Server on Linux, check out the thread here. I was up way too early in the morning, as I normally am, so I decided to poke around and see how it was done. SQL Server pros, here you can see you can get some deep internal information from the OS very easily. Hopefully with this blog post you’ll be able to compare how this is done on Windows and draw the connections between the two platforms and leverage this technique in other areas.

So I’ve been using dbatools for automated restore tasks and came across a SQL Server Agent job that I wrote that was reporting success but the job was actually failing.

What I found was the function I used, Restore-DbaDatabase, was not able to access the path that I was trying to restore databases from. The Restore-DbaDatabase function, and all dbatools functions according to the dbatools team on Slack, will throw a Warning rather than an Error by design.

A few weeks back several SQL Server bloggers discussed their academic pasts…well here I’m going to let you in on a little secret of mine too. I failed out of college too. I was a Management Information Systems major and limped along with a 1.82 GPA before I got tossed from The University of Mississippi in 1999.

Fast forward a few years, in 2002 I went back to school at Benedictine University in Lisle Illinois to study Computer Science.  There I finished my Bachelors degree in 2005 with a 3.98 GPA graduated with honors. I was fortunate to learn from a collection of retied Lucent engineers…and if you know the history of corporate research…Bell Labs engineers. It was an unbelievable educational experience. And they were cool too, we watched the 2004 Cubs in the classroom that fateful night Steve Bartman got a little too ambitious around a foul ball.

Next week I’ll be speaking at TechMentor in Redmond, I’m doing a 1/2 day workshop on Linux OS Fundamentals for the Windows Admin be sure to come see me!

If you’re there on Monday night (August 7th) and let’s get together for dinner! We’ll talk tech and hopefully make a few new friends and networking connections!

Where – We’ll start at the Hyatt Regency Bellevue, light appetizers will be provided. Then we’ll head on over to Lot No. 3 for dinner. I’ll pick up the first round of drinks and the appetizers!

I’ll be speaking at TechMentor, August 7-11 at Microsoft HQ in Redmond. Surrounded by your fellow IT professionals, TechMentor provides you with in-depth, immediately usable training that will keep you relevant in the workforce.

I’ll be presenting the following session: Workshop: Linux OS Fundamentals for the Windows Admin – this will be a fun session getting you started on your road to Linux proficiency, we’ll install Linux together and work through things like command line syntax, building complex commands with pipeline, performance basics and package management.