SQL

New Pluralsight Course – SQL Server on Linux Administration Fundamentals

  My new course **“SQL Server on Linux Administration Fundamentals”** in now available on Pluralsight <a href="https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/sql-linux-administration-fundamentals">here</a>! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer <a href="https://www.pluralsight.com/player?name=a0d5ed59-1d43-4233-ae90-b5b391e8d43d&mode=live&clip=0&course=sql-linux-administration-fundamentals">here</a> or if you want to dive right in check it out <a href="https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/sql-linux-administration-fundamentals">here</a>!

  This course targets DBAs that design and maintain SQL Server on Linux systems (or those evaluating the technology). This course can be used by both the seasoned DBA to learn foundational Linux skills and also what’s new and different when running SQL Server on Linux.

  **Course Description**

  SQL Server is available on Linux, and management wants you to leverage this shift in technology to more effectively manage your data platform. In this course, SQL Server on Linux Administration Fundamentals, you’ll delve into SQL on Linux in order for you to become an effective DBA.  First, you'll explore an overview of its architecture, installation, and configuration. Next, you'll learn how to administer SQL Server on Linux. Finally, you'll discover high availability and disaster recovery options available to you for keeping your SQL Server online. By the end of this course, you'll have a solid foundation necessary to utilize SQL Server on Linux in production.

  The modules of the course are:

<ul>
  <li>
    **Introduction and SQL Server Architecture** – Introduce the viewer into world of SQL Server on Linux. Why did Microsoft do this? What’s the strategy? Introduce the SQL Server Ecosphere, such as the database engine, SQL Server Agent and SSIS.
  </li>
  <li>
    **Installing and Configuring SQL Server on Linux** – We’ll look at our installation and configuration options for SQL Server on Linux, introducing Linux package managers and repositories and install SQL Server on Linux and it’s components.
  </li>
  <li>
    **Administering Linux for DBAs** – We’ll look at managing services with systemd and how to query journald’s log files for information about SQL Server.  Also dive into file ownership, disk partitioning concepts and mounting file systems and remote file systems.
  </li>
  <li>
    **Managing SQL Server on Linux: Administration and Tools** – Now that the viewer knows where things are in this new operating system, let’s move up the stack and look at the tooling available for SQL Server on Linux. We’ll cover VS Code, SSMS, SQLCMD and DBFS.
  </li>
  <li>
    **High Availability and Disaster Recovery with SQL Server on Linux** – Dive into the High Availability and Disaster Recovery options available to SQL Server on Linux<br />
  </li>
</ul>

  <a href="https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/sql-linux-administration-fundamentals"><img loading="lazy" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="pluralsight_logo_new_blck.jpg" src="/images/2016/04/pluralsight_logo_new_blck-1.jpg" alt="Pluralsight Redhat Linux" width="225" height="18" border="0" /></a>

  Check out the course at <a href="https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/sql-linux-administration-fundamentals">Pluralsight</a>!

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.

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.

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>