Comments on: SQL Azure Woes

By: SQL Azure Videos | SQLRockstar

SQL Azure Videos | SQLRockstar — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:49:07 +0000

[...] I have been railing on SQL Azure lately, I thought I could share with you some of the videos you can watch for free over at MSDN. In case [...]

By: Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 12:14:05 +0000

It’s all the same company. If they don’t have good checks for usability or quality control in one area, why should i assume they will be any better in a different area?

imagine if a car company like Toyota suddenly started to put out cars of lesser quality because one area lost focus on quality control and usability…

By: Stefan

Stefan — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 04:18:27 +0000

The stuff that works is described in SQL Online Books, the regular dev docs that come with every edition of MSSQL. So I believe the intent is to say “everything you know about MSSQL works except these few things and I’ll give you a link to a detailed description of them there so you know exactly what I’m talking about”

BTW, I’m not commenting from a position of authority (I don’t know the folks who made those decisions and I don’t work there). I was trying to help based on everything I learned about SQL Azure so far.

I’m also not asserting that it’s a good design. I’m just pointing out that the structure of the docs was used to draw conclusions about quality of patch testing which seems to be unrelated.

By: Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 03:45:29 +0000

if a conscious decision was made to have those links included in order to show what is NOT supported, then that decision was wrong.

there is no way you can convince me that it makes sense to link to items you do NOT support, and then not link to something that you do support. that is the complete opposite behavior of anything i would describe as useful. i would rather think it was an oversight by someone as opposed to a strategic decision. if it was a decision then that person needs to be given the opportunity to participate in some usability seminars.

can you imagine if i showed my child pictures of four desserts they will NOT be eating after dinner? how silly would that be? and then, under my breath, i mention that we have some crackers for dessert but they have to climb up into the cupboard to get it themselves.

yeah, it’s like that. it makes no sense to have built the site in that manner. someone needs to think simpler, and from an end-user point of view when it comes to documentation.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:09:53 +0000

Ugh, in my prev comment I meant to write “…you should not draw conclusions…”

By: Stefan

Stefan — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:08:23 +0000

Linking to DMV docs here is for the purpose of highlighting what is NOT supported so you have a good understanding of what’s missing.

Why? Because one of the main issues with migrating to SQL Azure is that it supports a subset of features compared to SQL Server. So the screen-shot above is intended to help evaluate migration rather than standard dev help.

What I’m saying here is that you should’ve draw conclusions on availability of dev docs and patching/testing policy based on this screenshot. Cheers!

By: Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:20:16 +0000

I have faith in you, Buck.

By: Buck Woody

Buck Woody — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:02:05 +0000

Keep the faith – v1 is always v1. There’s places to experiment and use this, and lots of places where it does not fit – but stay tuned, young man…

By: Mark S. Rasmussen

Mark S. Rasmussen — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:48:57 +0000

@Brent Ozar
sys.dm_db_partition_stats should be enough to evaluate the size seeing as the size you’re billed for is calculated from the number of active pages at any time. No concept of a data file or wasted space (except for internal fragmentation), only the number of pages matters.

@Thomas LaRock
I still don’t get how they could launch Azure without any backup options. Sure, you can synchronize, but what about consistency? And if their solution to scaling is sharding, consistency becomes an even bigger issue – a workaround would be to make snapshots, but we can’t do that either.

Their usual response to the traffic issue is to spin up a Windows Azure hosted script that retrieves and compresses the data before it’s downloaded, since internal Azure traffic is free. Still a crap “solution” though.

By: Thomas LaRock

Thomas LaRock — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:42:18 +0000

oh, yeah, that is slick, huh? kinda like how they bill you for the data you will pipe and the only way to do a ‘backup’ is to pipe data up and down.

still, it is no different than any other utility company.