>> Learn how easy it is to get
started with Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server,
going all the way back to SQL Server 2012.
This week on Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman and welcome to
this episode of Data Exposed.
We have the one and only Bob Ward joining us today.
Bob, thanks so much for joining us on Data Exposed.
Yet again, it's been just a minutes since we've
had you on the show but we're super-excited to have you here.
>> It's always a pleasure to be
on your show. It's great to be here.
>> Awesome, great. Today the topic
is Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server.
Now, this is something we've done episodes about before,
but it's been awhile and I wanted to check
in and get your perspective on
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server and also learn what's
new because there's been a ton of new things in this space,
so Bob, can you tell us a little bit more about this service?
>> Thanks, Anna. Just to remind your audience here,
you've got existing SQL Server installations today,
all the way back from even maybe 2012,
and you're thinking about maybe connecting it to Azure.
Now these SQL Servers can run on
your on-premises environment or even other
Clouds but you'd like to say,
can I just connect to Azure and get something for it?
That's why we call it Azure Arc-enabled
SQL Server because we're taking an existing SQL Server
and enabling it by bridging or archive yourself
to Azure and you're right, there's new stuff.
Look at all this. Like how about being able to do
a pay-as-you-go licenses for SQL Server.
We announced that last November as part of
the SQL Server 2022 launch,
but it's available for any version of
SQL Server support for Azure Arc.
We'll talk about that a little bit at the end but that's
a pretty big groundbreaking feature
that's been added to this lineup.
How about a free inventory of your instance and databases?
I have a cool demo to show on that one.
We have even things like best-practices assessment to get
configuration advice from Microsoft based on installation.
Now, we just announced this one,
automated backups and patching of your SQL Servers.
That really popular defender for
SQL Servers for things like vulnerability assessments,
Advanced Threat Protection, and new for
SQL 2022 Azure Active Directory
authentication and Purview Access Policies.
To be clear, Anna, you're not deploying SQL Server in Azure,
you're just connecting SQL Server Azure
and getting these type of services.
>> That's awesome, Bob, but one
thing you mentioned that caught my attention.
You said SQL Server 2012?
Can I use this, this SQL Server 2012?
>> I know, we're going to go back to previous releases
of SQL Server and allow you to
connect it to get some of these services.
Some of them are only available with recent versions but even
by pay-as-you-go license can go lead
back to older releases. It's pretty cool.
>> Wow, cool. I'm going to save my pay-as-you-go license question
because I don't know what that is because
I heard you prepared some demos.
>> I did. You want to see some demos of the stuff?
>> Yeah. Let's take a look.
>> I've got some demos for you, Anna. Always good demos.
>> Great.
>> Let's see it. Let's say right here,
if you have an example, I've got a SQL
2022 I've connected to Azure.
Now I'm in the Azure portal but notice
I'm seeing my SQL Server which is not deployed in Azure.
I can see a pay-as-you-go license with edition
of SQL Server. Look at this though.
Here's a list of all the databases
I've deployed when they were created.
I can even drill into a database and see
really important properties about the database.
Like what's a compat level
and what's the last backup of this database?
Each database property I can see I'm
doing all those Anna for free just
by connecting a SQL Server to Azure.
I haven't paid Microsoft anything yet,
just connect myself and see some interesting information.
Now to see one database at a time, that's cool.
How about something like this?
Let me flip over another part of my portal here.
What if I can show you like using something called Kusto query.
I can look across all my SQL Servers and all my databases and
give you like a histogram of DB compat levels.
This way I can tell, like,
what are the compat levels I need to look out
across my enterprise which ones
maybe I need to pull it to like maybe
newer versions or which one to keep on older versions.
Again, this is all free, it's part
our free inventory. How about this one?
How about which databases haven't been backed up?
Anna, you wouldn't believe this,
but I've run into customers because it happens.
They haven't backed up their database,
so they don't know which ones.
By connecting to Azure all my SQL Servers,
I can tell across every SQL Server I
have do I have any had been backed up yet or I
can do it other types of interesting queries
here across all sorts of
properties for my instance or my database. Again, all three.
>> Wow, is it pretty hard to set this up, Bob?
>> No, it's easy, Anna.
Look, it's so easy as this,
in SQL 2022, it's part of the setup process.
I mean setup SQL Server,
you can say here's my Azure subscription
that's want to connect myself to Azure.
We use these agents that are installed in
your virtual machine to connect, but yeah,
and then there's scripts available as you do as
well if you're running an older versions of SQL Servers,
it's pretty easy to set this up and connect.
>> Nice.
>> There's more. There's all sorts of if we could show here today,
but, I mentioned
best practices assessment so let me show you this one over here.
I've already run this on a SQL Server.
How would it be cool if you could take the advice of
Microsoft run or schedule an assessment to look at
the configuration of your SQL Server or
your databases and get some interesting results
like am I far off from doing
the best practices that could
actually really save me a lot of time,
money, and effort later.
First of all, you look here as I clicked on my assessment,
I'm looking like a graph.
Which ones have passed,
which ones have issues?
What's the priority of these issue and then a categorization.
If you see that right over here is a
couple of interesting examples
like instant file neutralization and lock pages
are two configuration options that people look all over
time but I could see errors that might have occured in my system.
Or maybe TempDB is not configured properly for the best IO.
I can even see things like
fragmentation information at
the database table level, my database.
A lot of rich information about best-practices,
one thing I like about this feature,
though I run this is like the reporting piece of
it so I can see what new issues have popped in since my last run.
Which ones have I resolved and I love insights.
What are the most reoccurring issues are
happening across all my databases in SQL Servers.
The cool thing about this tool as well though,
you're not paying for the best-practice
service or anything like that,
you just pay what's called a Log Analytics workspace,
which is really inexpensive and you start running this assessment,
and scheduling to see things across time,
across your database, for instance.
This are cool examples
of just stuff we're doing here with Azure Arc.
>> Yeah, super cool. Another question on this is,
I've seen this before for SQL Server and
Azure VM is this the same assessment that's being run?
>> How cool is that? It's all based on the SQL assessment API.
Yes, we've got a common experience now
across running SQL Server and Azure VM,
and your SQL Servers that are connect with Azure Arc.
>> Nice. That is awesome.
You know, Bob, the other thing,
I mentioned this earlier,
you mentioned pay as you go.
As a SQL Server person that's not
something I thought was possible,
unless you're using like Azure SQL database in the Cloud.
Can you tell us a little more about that?
>> Let me show I've got a slide here, it summarizes
this and you nail that in the head.
Somebody is looking to maybe do things
like instead of capital expenditure,
like operational expenditures and so they would normally go run
a SQL Server and Azure Virtual Machine or Azure
database to do is like a pay per core,
pay per hour, pay monthly type model.
Well, some of our customers said like,
I would like that same experience wherever I'm running SQL Server,
whether it be on-premises or even another
Cloud and now we offer that.
By configuring the Azure Arc and saying I'd
like a pay-as-you-go license you use
your Azure subscription and you pay
Microsoft on a per hour per core basis,
even if SQL Server is running in your environment.
I mentioned that operational expenditure scenario.
What about the ability to have like not upfront costs?
You're getting that field of getting billed like you're
an Azure and what's really interesting in is this third scenario.
Look at the chart right here.
Let's say I have SQL Servers that are not
100 percent utilized across months or each month.
You can see right here by this chart.
Let's say I only use
a SQL Server and we've got some examples here.
ERP, payroll scenarios maybe I use it like
half the month or 33 percent of the month or something.
You can see it'll be cheaper to do a pay-as-you-go license
instead of using your existing SQL Server licenses.
This is not Azure Hybrid Benefit.
This is literally just doing a pay-as-you-go license in
your environment just like you're running inside
of Azure using your Azure subscription.
Again, on-premises or other Clouds this all works as long as
you can connect using Azure Arc with SQL Server.
>> That's pretty cool, Bob. This chart reminds of
the serverless model except now it's like a licenseless who
pays-as-you-go type of license so
super cool that we're enabling customers
to use what they need and try to
minimize any overpayment in this case of licenses.
As we start to wrap up,
what are some key tips
and tricks on how to get started with this thing?
I know you mentioned it wasn't too difficult.
>> It can be easy. Look at
our link up here at the top that we have for you.
That's a great way to get started by looking
just the documentation wherever your environment is.
First of all, one thing is interesting
about this because we've had customers say like,
well, I got 100 SQL Servers.
What like click this one at a time.
No, we have onboarding scripts to connect at
scale so you can say I got 100 SQL Servers.
I'd like to enable them for Azure Arc across all of
those but we have something called the
Azure extension for SQL Server,
which these scripts will use and in SQL Server 2022,
it's integrated into the setup experience,
whether you do that through the Gully or
the command line but there's
also a set of scripts for you to do and
deploy that and what's really neat about this,
Anna is, you can go to the Azure portal and do this.
You'd say, I'd like to enable
my SQL Server with Azure Arc and then
we will give you the onboarding script to
pull down on your environment to connect.
Then one thing that's interesting about
this Azure Arc model is there's
this concept called Azure Arc servers,
like a Windows Server or a
Linux Server and so if you've already got
your Windows Server or Linux Server
enabled with Azure Arc using their technology,
we will actually try to go find
those and give you a notification to say,
by the way, we know she got a SQL Server running here,
we would like to connect it to Azure Arc as well.
A lot of easy ways to get started,
check out our documentation.
We find this to be a very simple process.
Anna, we need to come back on the show like six months later.
We're just getting started this model like what
if we could do things like monitoring or improve that whole,
this is continuity model and so forth.
Look for us to be able to
create more functionality on
Azure Arc as we go forward and we don't need
to release a new version of SQL Server
to do it so we can innovate here
quite frequently with Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server.
>> Wow, well, Bob,
thanks so much for coming on the show.
I think we might have just gotten
a sneak peek at the roadmap so that's pretty exciting.
Love to have you back on the show in a couple of months.
To our viewers, go ahead and we'll put
this link in the description for you to
learn more so go ahead, check it out,
see how easy this might be to set up and configure and start
getting the advantages of
Azure wherever your SQL servers are running.
If you like this episode, go ahead,
give it a like and leave us
a comment and let us know what you think
and we hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
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