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Proactive Reporting for SQL Server

If you’re a return reader of this blog you know I write often about monitoring and performance of Availability Groups. I’m a very big proponent of using monitoring techniques to ensure you’re meeting your service level agreements in terms of recovery time objective and recovery point objective. In my in person training sessions on “Performance Monitoring AlwaysOn Availability Groups”, I emphasize the need for knowing what your system’s baseline for healthy replication and knowing when your system deviates from that baseline. From a monitoring perspective, there are really two key concepts here I want to dig into…reactive monitoring and proactive monitoring.

This month I’ll be speaking to the PowerShell Virtual Chapter of PASS. The session is on Linux OS Fundamentals for the SQL Admin. At the core of the session we will introduce you to OS concepts like managing files and file systems, installation packages, using PowerShell on Linux, managing system services, commands and processes and system resource management. This session is intended for those who have never seen or have very little exposure to Linux but are seasoned Windows or SQL administrators. Things like processes, memory utilization and writing scripts should be familiar to you but are not required.

This week we started our Centino Systems weekly newsletter. Check out the first edition here!

The newsletter is going to include the latest in SQL Server and other things in technology that I think are important or interesting…and maybe you will too!

So if you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter go ahead and sign up here!

My new course “LFCE: Advanced Network and System Administration” 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

When designing Availability Group systems one of the first pieces of information I ask clients for is how much transaction log their databases generate. *Roughly*, this is going to account for how much data needs to move between their Availability Group Replicas. With that number we can start working towards the infrastructure requirements for their Availability Group system. I do this because I want to ensure the network has a sufficient amount of bandwidth to move the transaction log generated between all the replicas. Basically are the pipes big enough to handle the generated workload. But bandwidth is only part of the story, we also need to ensure latency is low. Why, well we’re going to explore that together in this post!

Today, I’m proud to announce that I have been named a Microsoft MVP – Data Platform.  This is an exceptional honor and I’m humbled to be included in this group of exceptional data professionals. I really look forward to working with everyone in the MVP community and continuing to contribute to our unmatched SQL Community!

What is an MVP?

Speaking at SQLSaturday Nashville!

  I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/581/EventHome.aspx">SQL Saturday Nashville</a> on January 14th 2017! This will be my first speaking event this year and I look forward to seeing you there!

  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/581/RegisterNow.aspx">Sign up now</a>!

  My presentation is **“<a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/581/Sessions/Details.aspx?sid=56663">Performance Monitoring AlwaysOn Availability Groups</a>”** (which is one of my favorite sessions)

  **This is an updated session including new Availability Group Monitoring Extended Events and SQL 2016!**

  <a href="http://www.sqlsaturday.com/581/EventHome.aspx"><img loading="lazy" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="NewImage.png" src="/images/2016/12/NewImage.png" alt="NewImage" width="187" height="86" border="0" /></a>

  Here’s the abstract for the talk

<blockquote>

    Have you deployed Availability Groups in your data center? Are you monitoring your Availability Groups to ensure you can meet your recovery objectives? If you haven’t this is the session for you. We will discuss the importance of monitoring and trending Availability Group Replication, how AGs move data between replicas and the impact replication latency can have on the availability of your systems. We’ll also give you the tools and techniques to go back to the office and get started monitoring and trending right away!

</blockquote>

OK, so everyone wants to know how Microsoft did it…how they got SQL Server running on Linux. In this article, I’m going to try to figure out how.

Update: Since the publication of this post, Microsoft has published a blog post detailing the implementation here.

There’s a couple of approaches they could take…a direct port or some abstraction layer…A direct port would have been hard, basically any OS interaction would have had to been looked at and that would have been time consuming and risk prone. Who comes along to save the day? Abstraction. The word you hear about a million times when you take Operating Systems classes in undergrad and grad computer science courses.:)

Open Source PowerShell is available on several operating systems, that really what’s special about the whole project! To get PowerShell to function on these various systems we need to build (compile) the software in that environment. This is what will produce the actual executable program that is powershell.

To facilitate the build process the PowerShell team has documented how to do this for the currently available platforms, Linux, MacOS and Windows. In this post I want to talk about why this is important, point you to the resources available online to help you build Open Source PowerShell and tell you my experiences building PowerShell on the Windows, macOS and Linux!

Open Source PowerShell has been on fire, getting tons of community support and really making people think about what’s to come with a single language to manage a heterogenous data center.

To highlight this point, in my recent Pluralsight Play By Play Microsoft Open Source PowerShell on Linux and Mac with Jason Helmick and Jeffrey Snover I did a demo on using PowerShell remoting where I connected from a Linux machine to three other machines and retrieved lists of top processes from each…two Linux and one Windows. I used one script to accomplish this and no passwords. A simple implementation highlighting a very big idea. After, some people have asked…how did I do this without passwords?