Posts

I’m very pleased to announce that I will be speaking at PASS Summit 2017!  This is my first time speaking at PASS Summit and I’m very excited to be doing so! What’s more, is I get to help blaze new ground on a emerging technology SQL Server on Linux! My session is “Monitoring Linux Performance for the SQL Server Admin” so if you’re a Windows or SQL Server administrator, this session is for you. We’ll look at some of the internals of SQL Server on Linux and dive into Linux OS internals and show you where to look inside Linux for most important performance data for your SQL Server. I hope to see you there!

This past year has certainly been interesting in the world of Linux. Microsoft has taken a new strategy and is embracing the open source model. It’s releasing it’s key software products with versions for Linux. It’s truly a remarkable time. In this post I want to highlight some of the bigger events and cover what does this mean to you and where you can go do get some training on these topics.

Speaking at SQLSaturday Sacramento!

  I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/650/eventhome.aspx">SQL Saturday Sacramento</a> on July 15th 2017! And wow, 650 SQLSaturdays! This one won’t let you down. <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/650/Sessions/Schedule.aspx">Check out the amazing schedule</a>!

  If you don’t know what SQLSaturday is, it’s a whole day of free SQL Server training available to you at no cost!

  If you haven’t been to a SQLSaturday, what are you waiting for! <a href="https://www.sqlsaturday.com/650/registernow.aspx">Sign up now</a>!

  <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/650"><img loading="lazy" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="SQLSATSAC650.png" src="/images/2017/06/SQLSATSAC650.png" alt="SQLSATSAC650" width="127" height="20" border="0" /></a>

  **This year I have TWO sessions!**

  **1. <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/650/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=63281">Linux OS Fundamentals for the SQL Admin</a>**

<blockquote>

    SQL Server and PowerShell are now available on Linux and management wants you to leverage this shift in technology to more effectively manage your systems, but you’re a Windows admin!  Don’t fear! It’s just an operating system! It has all the same components Windows has and in this session we’ll show you that. We will look at the Linux operating system architecture and show you how to interact with and manage Linux system. By the end of this session you’ll be ready to go back to the office and get started working with Linux with a fundamental understanding of how it works.

</blockquote>

  **2. <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/650/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=63279">Designing High Availability Database Systems using AlwaysOn Availability Groups</a>**

<blockquote>

    Are you looking for a high availability solution for your business critical application? You're heard about AlwaysOn Availability Groups and they seem like a good solution, but you don't know where to start. It all starts with a solid design. In this session we introduce the core concepts needed to design a Availability Group based system. Covering topics such as recovery objectives, replica placement, failover requirements, synchronization models, quorum, backup and recovery and monitoring. This session is modeled after real world client engagements conducted by Centino Systems that have lead to many successful Availability Groups based systems supporting tier 1 business critical applications.

</blockquote>

With SQL Server on Linux, Microsoft has recognized that they’re opening up their products to a new set of users. People that aren’t used to Windows and it’s tools. In the Linux world we have a set of tools that work with our system performance data and present that to us as text. Specifically, the placeholder for nearly all of the Linux kernel’s performance and configuration data is the /proc virtual file system, [procfs][1]. Inside here you can find everything you need that represents the running state of your system. Processes, memory utilization, and disk performance data all of this is presented as files inside of directories inside /proc.

In our previous post we discussed how to implement OpenSSH (the plumbing) as the transport layer for PowerShell remoting. In this post, we’re going to leverage that configuration and look at some common remoting use cases. This is one of the core things I use everyday when I work with PowerShell. Remoting gives me the ability to administer scale up and administer large collections of systems. So like I said in my very first post about my PowerShell journey, it’s become a part of my every day life and techniques like this are at the core of how I use PowerShell. So let’s get started…

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQL Saturday Pensacola on June 3rd 2017! Check out the amazing schedule!

If you don’t know what SQLSaturday is, it’s a whole day of free SQL Server training available to you at no cost!

If you haven’t been to a SQLSaturday, what are you waiting for! Sign up now!

My presentation is **“Designing High Availability Database Systems using AlwaysOn Availability Groups” **

So in my last post I told you about how I started my journey on learning PowerShell, let’s keep going down that path together. In this post I’m going to introduce PowerShell Remoting in Multi-Platform Environments, specifically using OpenSSH. We’ll discuss WinRM in multi-platform systems in an upcoming post.

Have you ever had to execute a command against one system or a collection of systems? Have you ever wanted a remote shell on a Windows system? Using Remoting you can you can do all of these things, very, very easily.

Why do I use PowerShell?

Well, here’s a little back story…last year I was involved in a Pluralsight Play by Play with Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover for launch of Open PowerShell on Linux and Mac. Before this video, I didn’t take PowerShell seriously. Basically, if I Google’d a problem and found a solution in PowerShell I would grind my teeth and copy and paste the text into the foreign blue console and cross my fingers.

Availability Groups are a fantastic way to provide high availability and disaster recovery for your databases, but it isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to pull off correctly. To do it right there’s a lot of planning and effort that goes into your Availability Group topology. The funny thing about AGs is as hard as they are to plan…they’re pretty easy to implement…but sometimes things can go wrong. In this post I’m going to show you how to look into things when creating your AGs fails.

My new course “LFCE: Network and Host Security” 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