Upgrading to SQL 2016 (and 2017) and Windows Server 2016

A lot of engineering work has gone into easing upgrades for SQL Server and Windows at Microsoft. In general, a lot of breaking changes no longer happen especially around the database engine. But what about other components? What about Windows?

Many folks are wondering where to get the documents to help guide them on software upgrades.

I compiled a few links for a support manager in Microsoft, and am sharing them here.  I think this will help you get started.

Public Docs:

What’s new in SQL 2016 (and SQL 2017 is on the left menu) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2016

SQL Release Notes for a bunch of versions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/release-notes/sql-server-release-notes

Upgrade to 2016 from 2008R2, 2012, 2014…. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/install-windows/upgrade-sql-server

“Are you upgrading from SQL 2005?” https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/install-windows/are-you-upgrading-from-sql-server-2005

Windows Server technical content… 2016, 2012r2, 2012, 2008r2, 2008, 2003 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/windows-server-versions

Windows Server installation and upgrade https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/installation-and-upgrade

SQL Saturday! Albany July 29, 2017 – Come and learn Databases and BI!

Are you a data professional? Promoted into a DBA or BI role?

SQL Saturdays are free training events, put on by volunteers who deliver great content to you, the audience, all around Microsoft SQL Server, and surrounding technologies.

I am speaking at this saturday’s SQL Saturday, and have two major sessions:

Organizational Security & Compliance with SQL 2012 through 2016

Power BI: Architecture and demo

The technology stack can range from the relational engine, to Business Intelligence, Security, and out to adjacent technologies such as Powershell (for scripting), Hadoop and Big Data, and data lakes.

The people who volunteer range from Microsoft MVPs (recognized community contributors) and regular folks like yourself who got bit by the teaching bug.

Please come, and sign up here:

SQL Saturday Albany #622

Note: Most of the people who teach at these events are on Twitter, and can be discovered just by searching for PASS (Professional Association of SQL Server) or SQL Saturday.

Thanks, and happy learning!

Power BI: Pro Versus Premium

I have been sharing Power BI with customers for some time now.  A quick tour is here.

At a high level, Power BI lets you pull together one or more data sources, and create visualizations that are interactive. With our cloud capabilities, we enable english-language querying of these data models, and also offer statistical insights.

As of May 3rd, we announced some changes to the pricing and added a premium service option.

The raw components to make this work include the free Power BI Desktop, the Power BI Service, and Power BI Premium.  Reports that are to be shown outside of your organization can leverage the Power BI API for external report consumption.

Once an organization gets used to mashing together data in this desktop, they will need to share with others inside the organization.

Sharing and publishing shared content requires Power BI Pro licensing. This is a per-user license, and can be added onto Office 365, or purchased as a stand-alone option.

At some level, there may be a large number of “occasional readers” of reports.  The pricing for these people may not make sense to consume content with the per-user pro license.  For the readers at scale, Power BI Premium makes great sense.

More deep-dive links are below, around administering and provisioning Power BI and Premium capacity.  Feel free to ping me for more information!

Latest Video from Adam Saxton on announcements from the Data Insights Summit:

Power BI Premium, and what is it. (Pro versus premium tables are here)

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-premium/

Power BI Premium white paper

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/B/2/8B23B40C-E94B-49D6-AF19-456AC4D5DB00/Power%20BI%20Premium%20whitepaper%20v1a.pdf

A Power BI Administrator needs to “purchase” the premium capacity.

How to purchase Power BI Premium

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-premium-purchase/

Administering Power BI in your organization

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-administering-power-bi-in-your-organization/

Why migrate from Oracle to SQL Server? Especially in a hybrid scenario?

I was asked this question, and figured out a few things have moved forward since I thought about this in depth.

There are so many reasons why to get rid of your expensive exadata and oracle licenses, and Microsoft does offer help if you are interested.  Total cost of ownership has been shown to be much lower, and the throughput is excellent.

What I shared with my customer came to the following links:

Why else would the NASDAQ throw a 2 PETABYTE data warehouse on SQL (2014)?

SQL Server SURPASSED Oracle in the “Operational Database Systems” magic quadrant since 2014.  We have been excellent in the data warehousing category as well.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-license-migration

SQL 2016 is extremely fast. Check the TPC-H results for Data Warehousing

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2016/07/18/sql-server-2016-posts-world-record-tpc-h-10-tb-benchmark/

SQL Server is more secure than Oracle in terms of vulnerabilities

We also have “Always Encrypted”

“In SQL Server 2016, for the first time, you will hear about a capability that we call Always Encrypted,” he said. “This is about securing data all the way from the client, into the database and keeping it secure even when query processing is being done. At the database site, the data is never decrypted, even in memory, and you can still do queries over it.”

https://adtmag.com/articles/2016/03/10/sql-server-2016.aspx

Lufthansa used Azure to host an availability group replica of SQL Server to cut DR recovery times

http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/lufthansa-systems-cuts-data-recovery-time-from-minutes

SQL in Hybrid: On-prem doing AlwaysOn to Azure example:

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Deploy-a-SQL-Server-5608b684

More Hybrid SQL 2016 examples

http://sqlmag.com/scaling-success-sql-server-2016/sql-server-2016-hybrid-cloud-integration

SBI Liquidity migrated from SQL 2005 to SQL 2016, and engaged Premier Support to ensure success

http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/sbilm-sql-server-2016-premier-support-banking-capital-markets

Amway went to AlwaysOn in SQL plus Azure to get to a 30 second cutover time for their data.

“These data centers support about 34 terabytes of information spread across 100 instances of Microsoft SQL Server software, with the data load growing at an annual rate of about 15 percent.”

http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/global-direct-seller-sees-100-percent-availability-wit

As always, feel free to reach out with thoughts or feedback on this article!

Compliance and Security in Microsoft SQL Server 2012-2016

I present often to user groups and SQL Saturdays.  One topic which seems popular is the ability to secure and gain compliance in SQL Server.

This presentation is best delivered by myself or someone from Microsoft, with authority on the topics inside.

Here is my slideshare:

Please contact me if you’d like more information.

Azure (and SQL) Patterns and Practices

Customers ask for, and NEED, guidance and patterns for deploying into Azure (And SQL).

Patterns and Practices are written down, and created by the AzureCAT team, who help customers do cutting-edge deployments on Azure!

Feel free to use this link, to help understand the different areas where Azure has been deployed, and how you can do so as well!

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/azurecat/2017/01/05/hello-world-welcome-to-azurecat-guidance/

There are also great articles written down for SQL Server, and SQL on Azure, at SQLCAT:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlcat/

Thanks!

SQL 2016 SP1! Do you ever need SQL Enterprise again? (tl;dr, yes)

With much fanfare, SQL 2016 SP1 was released!  (Please read these release notes in depth before testing and deploying!)

The original blog post talks about PROGRAMMABILITY features and post RTM+CU2 enhancements added in.

“SQL Server 2016 SP1 also includes all the fixes up to SQL Server 2016 RTM CU3 including Security Update MS16–136.”

So if you are coding up a new application, and only need SQL Express, you can use columnstore indexes, or in-memory tables, or Always-Encrypted!

So why would anyone need SQL Enterprise with all these features in SQL Standard?

The following is my own notes gathered around the edition differentiation:

SQL Enterprise allows for the following:

Online database access 24×7:

Index rebuilds – Tables are accessible during table and index maintenance

Schema Changes – tables online while adding columns or other structure

File, page, or piecemeal restore is online by default – tables online while restoring corrupt pages, files, etc.

Disaster Recovery Scenarios: AlwaysOn Availability Groups with Local HA and remote Asynchronous copy

Scalability Scenarios: AlwaysOn Availability Groups with Readable or multiple secondary copies, and offloading backups to secondary

Larger datasets for in-memory or columnstore data

Whole-database encryption (TDE)

Third Party encryption key management

Better throughput optimizations for data warehousing and high-throughput OLTP

More than 24 cores needed

More than 128 gigs of RAM needed

Resource Governor (Control those difficult queries or applications via IO, CPU, or Memory, MAXDOP etc)

Standard and Enterprise post SP1 of SQL 2016 can use the following now:

Polybase to access Hadoop and other sources

Columnstore indexes

In-Memory tables

Table Partitioning

Always-Encrypted data from client to server

Row level security

Fine-grained auditing

Here is the full reference feature-by-feature for each edition of SQL 2016 SP1:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993.aspx

Datasheet (shiny!) for SQL 2016 SP1 editions

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/A/2/8A2BC8C5-BBA0-4A9C-90BC-AC957D3454D9/SQL_Server_2016_Editions_datasheet.pdf