Week of April 17th

“Seems so good… Hard to believe an end to it.. Warehouse is bare”

Greetings and Salutations..

My odyssey this week didn’t quite have the twists and turns of last week’s pilgrimage. Perhaps, it’s was a bit of hangover from Holy week or just the sheer lassitude from the over abundance of learning new skills during this quarantine?

Last weekend, I finally got a chance to tinker around with Raspberry PI. I managed to get it setup on my Wifi network.. Thanks to finding an HDMI to HDMI cable to hook it up to my 50′ Samsung TV. I learned how to set VSCode on the Amanda’s Mac and connect via SSH to my PI with out using a password (creating a token instead). I also got to play around with the Sense HAT Python module and made the Raspberry PI display some trippy flashing lights with the on-top add-on LED board.

So after being on Cloud 9 most of last week, I decided I should stay a little longer in the stratosphere and bang on the Google Cloud Platform or more endearing known as GCP. I would build my SQL Server 2016 Always On environment (previously created several weeks back on AWS and last week on Azure). Once again the goal would be to compare and contrast the 3 major cloud providers. In effort to avoid redundancy I won’t reiterate the same prerequisites taken to build out my SQL farm. However, I will share my observations with GCP

GCP Issues/Observations:
- More options than Azure but less then AWS — Interface was bit confusing to navigate through- 1st instance built (Domain Controller) got corrupt whenI upgraded my account from Free to Paid Instance need to be rebuilt- Windows Domain failed to be created because Administrator account (which is not disabled like on AWS and Azure) was set to blank- Disks can only be detached from an instance that is an “Stopped” state
Here are my final rankings based on the the 3 Cloud providers I evaluated

1. Best UI: AWS2. Most Features: AWS

2. Easiest to Navigate UI: Azure

3. Most suited for Microsoft workloads (i.e. SQL Server): Azure

4. Most enticing free offer to use it: GCP

5. Most potential: GCP

1. Hardest to Navigate UI: GCP

2. Hardest to configure (security): AWS

3. Least amount of features: Azure

So after burning out my fuse up there alone… it was time to touch down and bring me round again.. And that led me back to SQL Server and Columnstore Indexes. Here is what I did:

• Created 60 million rows for the Internet Sales Fact table
• Created Columnstore Index and benchmarked performance vs old Row based Index
• Created Table partition for Internet Sales Fact table and designed Partition Switching scenario (workaround used with SQL 2012 and non-clustered CIs) Old Lava Archive database design.

Next Steps..
Below are some topics I am considering for my voyage next week:

- Best practices around SQL Server AlwaysOn (Snapshot Isolation/sizing of Tempdb, etc)

• Data Visualization Tools (i.e. Looker)
• ETL Solutions (Stitch, FiveTran)
• Process and Transforming data/Explore data through ML (i.e. Databricks) .
• Getting Started with Kubernetes with an old buddy (Nigel)

Stay safe and Be well

-MCS

Originally published at http://sqlsquirrels.com on April 20, 2020.