[dba-SQLServer] [AccessD] A real puzzler

[Jim Lawrence]

Hi John:

You're not qualified. ;-)

If you had a BS and were in your twenties, any other qualifications would have been over-looked. Once over forty, not in a stable and consistent gig, you are either a project manager or not employed. The other reality of the universe, a free-lance tech must be networking continuously...I really have no idea how may workshops, training courses, presentations, cold-call/contract presentations and various other mixures I have been on over the years all in an effort to line up the next contracts. When I retired and stopped doing all the pimping and whoring everyone thought I was dead. I must have done something right as old employers still keep calling from time to time.

The truth is that I was totally feed up with Microsoft and Ballmer...both were going nowhere. Any work I do now is on the internet and through Linux...I just love the performance, stability, flexibility, security, no-forced upgrades, rolling release options, leading edge concepts and ideas. I have used Ubuntu for over a decade and upgrades are effortless. There is really nothing more powerful on the desktop. Their enterprise server is the same as the desktop...you can just use what you want...you are limited only by the power of you equipment.

I am glad to see that MS has finally embraced Linux. Did you know that MS Asure is really a huge Debian Linux farm, which uses Apache Hive, for expandability, Ubuntu 14.04 as the basic interface and OS, Juju, the Ubuntu Cloud building and management GUI tools and finally on top of that a pretty MS interface.

You have a system that has been built using hundreds (thousands) of hours of time and it could not be easily replaced or ever replaced. In your case I was thinking that maybe running up a cloud hourly test station, using a mini-version, might be something you would be interested in...like rent a server for a morning for around $4.00 and then maybe save the droplet and/or just blow it away. :-)

Jim          

----- Original Message -----
From: "John W. Colby" <jwcolby at gmail.com>
To: "Discussion concerning MS SQL Server" <dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Monday, August 10, 2015 12:29:43 PM
Subject: Re: [dba-SQLServer] [AccessD] A real puzzler

I have always been interested in using a cloud to perform the 
calculations.  However:

1) I have about 600 GB of data in 9 different SQL Server databases.
2) I have 2 years of custom C# written development code in a pair of 
applications that directly manipulate SQL Server to perform the work 
that I do.
3) That C# code performs backups to storage local to the C# Server.
4) I keep the database files themselves on SSD, using about 700 GB (of 1 
TB) of Raid SSD storage, on the same system that SQL Server runs on
5) I keep the log files on rotating media, again on the same physical 
machine.
6) I have 16 cores and 80 gb of RAM, and the SQL Server uses it all.
8) I use compression extensively, which requires cores to decompress 
data in memory as it is used.
9) The custom C# code I run is running on a VM, accessing data in SQL 
Server, and shoveling CSV files off to a set of 4 (currently) VMs which 
then run custom third party apps which clean the data, then imports the 
cleaned data back into SQL Server

10) And finally, I am a one man show.  I do not have a million dollar 
budget and a half dozen flunkies to throw at feasibility studies, nor 
migration to the cloud.

To be quite honest, I consider myself quite lucky and quite skilled to 
have designed, coded and built the system I have, over a period of many 
years.  It is a very complex system that does a simple job that requires 
a complex system.  The system as it stands uses a pair of pretty darned 
powerful servers, one running six  VMs, the other running a largish 
instance of SQL Server, all tightly integrated with custom software 
level virtual networks to allow everything to talk to each other.  Every 
month this system exports about 500 MILLION addresses for cleaning, to 
the VMs running the third party software, shipping data across the 
internet from the VMs to their servers in California, then back to the 
VMs and from there back into the SQL Server.  Every two months I have to 
download a 3 gb install disk from the third party software house, and 
install that (upgrade the software) on the VMs.

I built the servers from parts, installed all software from disk or 
downloadable images, tweaked to get things running off of SSDs to get 
the last ounce of speed, created VMs, cloned them, running off of SSDs.  
I designed the C# systems, and coded about 40% myself, with the 
remaining done under my supervision by a kid I hired out of a C# class I 
took.  All of this work done in my home office, over a period of about 4 
years.

And the odd part (to me) is that I am considered unqualified to get a 
job in the IT world because I don't have a BS(!) degree and a laundry 
list of silly software experience check boxes.

Never mind what you have done, which of these things that you will never 
actually be required to do can you say you have extensive experience 
in?  Laundry lists of them!

:)

So could I "run my database up on the cloud?".  If anything goes wrong 
could I fly up into the cloud to fix it?  How much of my non-existent 
million dollar budget could I eat up in tech support because the system 
is hard down for some reason and no one has a clue.

Had the cloud been available when I started this venture I think I would 
have designed it around the cloud.  Now to go back and port it all to 
the cloud is pretty much not happening.

John W. Colby

On 8/10/2015 4:57 AM, Jim Lawrence wrote:
> You can actually run your database up on a Cloud based system.
>
>
> Just a thought.
>
> Jim
>
>

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