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Don’t use Storage Spaces…

… if you care about performance in the slightest bit. That’s it really. You don’t need to read any further. What are storage spaces? Have a read of this quick overview: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-storage-spaces-windows-10 I had some spare computer parts laying around so I thought I’d rebuild my Windows 10 desktop at home. I have 4 x 4TB Hitachi SATA drives and a hardware RAID controller spare so decided to put them in my desktop. I had heard of storage spaces and wanted to try it out to see how performance would be considering there was no extra hardware involved in creating

SQL Server Container Performance

Is SQL Server in a container faster than a VM? I briefly looked at SQL Server containers when Windows Server 2016 was released. Containers offer the ability for rapid provisioning, and denser utilization of hardware because the container shares the base OS’s kernel. There is not a need for a Hyper-Visor layer in between. As a recap for those that are not up speed with containers, the traditional architecture of databases in a VM is like so: The Hyper-Visor OS is installed onto the host hardware, a physical server in the data centre. Many VMs are created on the Hyper-Visor

Why is Sqlpackage Using All The Build Server Memory?

Sqlpackage can be particularly resource-intensive when scripting a database that has a considerable amount of objects. In this post I'm going to discuss the options available when scripting out a database deployment file from a dacpac when using sqlpackage.exe. I'm also going to investigate how resource intensive they are and what we can do to limit the hardware resources used and how much of an impact this has on our waiting times, with some interesting results on where we were taking the performance hit. Recently I've noticed that when we have more than one build running at the same time

Log Shipping: It's Better Than Bad It's Good!

I'm probably showing my age by quoting an old Ren and Stimpy cartoon here, but to be fair it probably sums up log shipping pretty well. This post is focusing on using a read-only log shipping database for reporting purposes, and the limitations of read-only log shipped databases. I also share some monitoring scripts and a few ideas on how to improve restore performance without having to upgrade the hardware/software. Despite the development of AlwaysOn in recent releases of SQL Server, log shipping is still a great way to set up a copy of databases to be used for reporting.

VSTS Hosted Build Agent Specs

I was interested to know just what the hardware specifications of the hosted build agent is. So I added some PowerShell to read out the info below: 2016-06-29T09:23:31.3935358Z systemname      Name                                      DeviceID NumberOfCores NumberOfLogicalProcessors Addresswidth 2016-06-29T09:23:31.3935358Z ----------      ----                                      -------- ------------- ------------------------- ------------ 2016-06-29T09:23:31.3935358Z TASKAGENT5-0010 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz CPU0                 2                         2           64 2016-06-29T09:23:31.4095356Z Total memory:  7167.55078125 What piqued my interest greater was that this is the exact same spec for a D2 v2 box that is available via Azure. Clearly, Microsoft have a build agent template which is built, stored in a pool, and provisioned whenever a build