Monthly Archives: April 2013

The accumulating cost of digital certificates

23 April 2013 By in General thoughts Tags: , 1 Comment

The last few months I’ve had to go through several of the annoying certificate-renewal processes that recur every year. It’s always a painful process, not only because you always start the process too late, it’s a lot of effort and paperwork (which never goes smoothly), but you also realize that you’re paying quite a lot of money, for what exactly?
We are a small SaaS (Software as a Service) company, and we have the following digital certificates:

  • Two wildcard SSL certificates. Every SaaS company that offers a separate sub-domain for each customer needs these. We pay €775 for each wildcard certificate, with a 2-year validity (from Thawte).
  • A code-signing certificate. We offer a few rich-client applications from our web-applications, using ClickOnce technology. These applications need a digital signature. Cost of the certificate is €385 for a 2-year code-signing (Authenticode) certificate from Thawte.
  • A BAPI certificate. This is needed for (e-mail) communications for the Dutch tax authorities. Costs €240, with a validity of 3 years.
  • A PKI certificate from the Dutch government, for SOAP-webservice communications with the Dutch authorities (Government, Chambers of Commerce, Banks). Cost: €600 for a certificate with a validity of 3 years.

In my case, the renewal of Thawte’s code-signing certificate was especially painful, as it didn’t work on Windows 8, and I was send into several dead-ends by Thawte’s support, such as “try it in Firefox” (Authenticode certificate renewal only works in IE), or “start IE9 in Windows 8” (how exactly?).

All in all, it may not seem a lot of money in total, but if you include the effort it takes every time, I find it quite a burden. It would be nice if in the future you would only need a single digital certificate for the company as a whole.

Why are there no out-of-the-box high-availability solutions for SQL Server in the cloud?

21 April 2013 By in Application infrastructure, Cloud hosting Tags: , , , 1 Comment

When selecting any cloud service, you would like to get some guarantees about the reliability (uptime) and durability (what is the chance that your data is lost) of the service. Now, let’s see what we can find on cloud relational database services, either as a PaaS (Platform as a Service), or installed as part of an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service, i.e. virtual machines) configuration.

  • Windows Azure SQL Database gives an uptime SLA of 99.9%. The database is replicated treefold (within the same datacenter), but Microsoft gives no SLA for durability of the data. It indicates that to secure your data against widespread datacenter failure, you will need to export your complete database yourself (as a SQL script, or a BACPAC file).
  • Amazon RDS (Relation Database Service)  has no SLA at all for uptime or durability. In the past, RDS has turned out to be the most unreliable of Amazon’s services, because it is build on top of the EC2 services (virtual machines) and the EBS service (virtual drives). RDS uses SQL Server logfiles to be able to restore a complete server instance (not separate databases) to a maximum time of 5 minutes ago. It also maintains daily snapshots of the instance, which can be retained for a maximum of 35 days. RDS also offers live replication and failover to another datacenter (Multi-AZ), but this is not available for SQL Server.
  • SQL server running on virtual machines of Amazon (EC2) or Microsoft (Azure Virtual Machines) have no SLA. There is only an SLA for the underlying virtual machines from both Amazon and Microsoft for 99,95% uptime.

So, from this I have to conclude there’s really a lot of uncertainty about the reliability and durability of any database service in the cloud. It also means that for SaaS applications where you can not afford to a have a few hours (or more) downtime you have to look into separate high-availability solutions. What is available in this area, specifically for SQL Server?

  • Windows Azure SQL Database has no built-in high-availability solution. You can copy a database to a new database in the same datacenter, but to copy it to another datacenter you have to export/import all data to a new database. Failover to a database copy will have to be managed manually.
  • Amazon RDS has a Multi-Availability-Zone option (Multi-AZ), where a database replica is maintained in another datacenter in the same region. This option, however, is only available for Oracle and MySQL, not for SQL Server. For SQL server your only option is to make instance snapshots, but you can not copy RDS snapshots to another datacenter.
  • On Amazon or Microsoft Azure virtual machines, you can implement any of the standard high-availability solutions of SQL Server (SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, database mirroring, log shipping). But keep in mind the following:
    • SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn, and asynchronous database mirroring,  are only available in the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server. You will have to buy your own license for this, which is extremely price ($7000 per core).

    All of these high-availability solutions that you implement yourself on top of cloud virtual machines require a lot of expertise, ongoing management, and more than double the cost of the solution.

Conclusion: In general, for SaaS suppliers durability of data is much more important than uptime. In most cases 99,9% uptime would be sufficient (less than 1 hour downtime each month), but data durability has to be “Nine Nines” (99,9999999%), because any permanent data loss is unacceptable. Currently, none of the cloud relational database suppliers can offer this reliabiliy “out of the box” for SQL Server. Amazon RDS’s Multi-AZ solution comes closest (at almost double the price), but it is not available for SQL Server. Suggested manual solutions (based on export/import of data) are in many cases completely unrealistic for large amounts of data, because it could take days to complete an import of terabytes of data.

With all this,  are cloud relational database services currently an option for business-critical applications? I think they are, but the situation with regards to high-availability needs to improve rapidly, so that high-availability is simply an option to check. In the mean time, especially when you need to keep costs in check, we will need to rely on old-fashioned methods like log-shipping and data-export to safeguard our own data.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server has some ridiculous storage constraints

19 April 2013 By in Cloud hosting Tags: , , Leave a comment

When you think about cloud computing, you think scalability, flexibility, etc. Right? Not really when you look at the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server, at least the storage part of that service. RDS is Amazon’s database PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering for relational databases, and it does a lot of things right: New instances running with a few clicks, backups fully-automated with restore to point-in-time functionality, good monitoring tools, etc. However when it comes to the storage part of the SQL Server part of RDS, there are some serious constraints:

  • You can not change the allocated data storage after creating the SQL Server instance. That’s right, you have to allocate, and pay for, the maximum storage that you will ever use in the future. Not only is this impossible to predict, but it means that you pay for a lot of unused storage, something “the cloud” was supposed to prevent.
  • When selecting guaranteed IO performance (provisioned IO per second, or IOPS) additional constraints are present:
    • The storage must be an exact multiple of 100GB. Storage costs $0,138 per GB/month.
    • The selected IOPS must be exactly 10 times the storage in GB (so with 200GB storage you must select 2000 IOPS). IOPS costs $0,11 per IOPS/month.

Now, for any serious databases use, you need reliable performance, which means that you almost always have to select the provisioned IOPS option. So if I create a database instance with 1 TB storage (the maximum, which I have to select because later expansion is not possible), I have to select the 10,000 IOPS option, and I am paying $138 per month for the storage and $1100 per month for the IOPS. In addition to that, of course, you also pay for the instance itself.

Strangely enough, the storage constraints when using Oracle and MySQL are much less strict: You can scale the storage up at any time, without downtime, and when selecting provisioned IOPS the storage can be any value between 100GB and 3TB, and the IOPS/storage factor can be any value between 3 and 10.

So what is going on here? Do Windows Server and/or SQL Server have such inherent constraints that the same storage flexibility as for Oracle/MySQL can never be achieved? Or has the Amazon RDS team just not yet had the time to fully come to grips with the Microsoft systems?

SQL Server connection timeout in .NET client also used as transaction timeout? Mmm…

18 April 2013 By in General thoughts Tags: Leave a comment

Sometimes you spend several days (or nights) trying to solve a problem, only to find out your problem is caused by some inexplicable design decision you couldn’t possibly anticipate. In this case, I was investigating errors we’ve head on peak hours from our SQL Server database server, where we got “Timeout expired” errors on commit or rollback of database transactions, for the last two months.
Now, our database server probably doesn’t have enough capacity to deal with its load on peak hours, but still, we hadn’t had any errrors like this before, even at the busiest of times. Completion of transactions in SQL Server (and especially commits) have always been very fast on SQL Server, in my experience over the last 20 years.

When searching the internet, it turns out quite a few people have this same problem, but nobody knows exactly why. In the end, there’s exactly one place to find the surprising answer, provided by Matt Neerincx of the SQL Server team in a forum post:

The value used in the .NET SQLClient class for the client-side transaction timeout is the value set for the connection timeout of the database connection.

In his post, Matt explains that in this case they had no other values available in the class interface, so they decided to re-use the existing value for the connection timeout. Now, for me these two values are completely unrelated. Sometimes you want to set the connection timeout pretty low, so that un unavailable server, or incorrectly provided server name, is detected without a very long wait. I had done just that, by reducing our default connection timeout from 30 to 20 seconds, never suspecting this would have these drastic side-effects on the completion of transactions!

Ah well, problem solved, on to the next: This morning we had one of the infamous “Deadlock detected” errors in our ASP.NET web application. That’s another can of wurms, trying to make sense of the myriad of threadpool-related settings in ASP.NET.

I have to take a test before I’m allowed to give Microsoft money?

13 April 2013 By in General thoughts Tags: , , Leave a comment

Today I was trying to renew the Microsoft Action Pack (MAP) subscription for my company. Now, the MAP really is a good deal: For €380 per year, any small company (less than 100 employees) that creates or integrates IT-solutions based on Microsoft technology gets access to almost all Microsoft software, with a small number of licenses for each product, that can be used for regular business use, including 3 full MSDN subscriptions. I had to do this renewal during my vacation, because Microsoft uses some pretty strong language for what happens if you let the subscription slip for only one day (you have to destroy all media, remove all licensed software, and even if you subscribe again later, you can never get the rights back to use older software versions).

The “interesting” part is, that just before you’re trying to use your credit card to pay, you get the message that you first have to complete an online seminar, with an accompanying assessment (test) for which you have to score 70%, before being allowed to proceed. So you have to go to 30 or so slides of an online seminar (which seems to be pretty outdated, with no mention of Windows 8 at all), trying to remember the differences between the various versions of Windows Sever 2008. This takes maybe 30 minutes, including the test. And after that, as it turns out, you have to take another online seminar and test, this time with specific questions about the Development & Design MAP (with questions like wat LINQ stands for). Not only is it a little bit absurd that to be allowed to pay money to Microsoft you have to complete some tests first, but also that it is assumed that the person who does the ordering and payment is able to follow these seminars and do the tests.

So, after an hour I passed all the tests (mostly answering “All of the above” to questions about what a specific piece of Micosoft software can do), and finally I was allowed to enter my credit-card details. Well, at least now I know that Windows Server 2008 Foundation can do nothing useful, and that the Microsoft licensing options are too complex for anyone to understand. Still love Visual Studio 2012 though (after removing the all-caps menus), so all’s good!

Amazon EC2 monthly price tables for SaaS-relevant configurations, in euros

10 April 2013 By in Application infrastructure Tags: Leave a comment

EC2 is Amazon’s cloud service for flexible use of virtual machines. One of the big advantages of this service is that Amazon’s hourly prices also include the cost for the Windows and/or SQL Server license. Amazon has just announced lower prices for Windows EC2 instances.

It’s not always easy to calculate total monthly costs for various configurations, so in this post I will try to give an indication of montly costs for configurations that would be relevant for SaaS applications with 1,000 – 50,000 customers.
Note: In the monthly prices below I have incorporated the upfront costs for 1- and 3-year contracts in the monthly prices (spread out over the full term).
All prices are calculated for the EU region (Ireland).

Windows web server. No additional storage.

Configuration Resources On-demand (hourly) p/m 1-year term p/m 3-year term p/m
M1 large instance 2 cores, 7.6 GB memory €200 €131 €99
M1 extra large instance 4 cores, 15 GB memory €400 €262 €198
M3 double extra large instance 8 “second-generation” cores, 30 GB memory €859 €554 €419

Traffic out (to the internet) is an additional €92 per TB.

Load-balanced high-activity Windows web server.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancer
3 M3 double extra large EC2 instance on 3-year terms
5 TB of internet traffic per month
Total cost per month = €1763

Database server, EC2 instance with Windows server 2008/2012 and SQL Server Web Edition 2008/2012.

Prices below include 1TB of database storage on EBS (Elastic Block Storage, Amazon’s virtual drives). For instances without guaranteed I/O I have included 500 million I/O requests per months. Upfront costs have been spread over the months of the term.

Configuration Resources Guaranteed I/O On-demand (hourly) p/m 1-year term p/m 3-year term p/m
High-memory extra-large instance 2 cores, 17 GB memory (no guaranteed I/O) €463 €292 €249
High-memory double extra-large instance 4 cores, 34 GB memory 500 Mbps €798 €467 €384
High-memory quadruple extra-large instance 8 cores, 68 GB memory 1000 Mbps €1491 €829 €666

Note that you would also need additional storage for database backups, which could add €100-500 per month, depending on backup methods and backup retention.

Meta-database design in the cloud

10 April 2013 By in Database design Tags: , , Leave a comment

When designing the (relational) database infrastructure for a SaaS (Software as a Service) application, one of the most important decisions is how to store the data of each SaaS customer:

  1. Store the data of each customer in a separate database
  2. Store the data of all customers in a single database
  3. Store the data of each customer in a separate schema in the same database
  4. Store groups of customers in the same database, using several (but a relatively small number of)  databases

Here I’d like to discuss my thoughts and preferences about some of these options.

Database terminology

I am using the terminology as it is used for Microsoft SQL Server (which mostly is the same for MySQL),  but which is different for Oracle:

  • A database-server instance is the complete database service. In Oracle this is called a database.
  • A database  is a group of data with its own database schema, storage, security, and backup/recovery. By default in SQL Server each database has as its storage one database file and one log file.
    Oracle doesn’t have the concept of a database: what comes closest is a schema in Oracle, but this is not exactly the same. Nevertheless, for simplicity most people use: “database in SQL Server/MySQL” = “schema in Oracle”.
  • A schema is a group of data-objects within a database, with its own definition. A database can contain multiple schemas. Usually is schema is tied to a user (in Oracle the correspondence between a user and a schema is still strict), but in SQL Server (since SQL Server 2005) a schema is not strictly tied to a specific user anymore. MySQL doesn’t have the concept of multiple schemas within a database.

Advantages of having a separate database for each customer

Now, in my experience, this subject of how to design the meta-database structure for a SaaS application is something that is not always well thought out, or not even thought about at all. Also, in internet discussions no agreements or guidelines on this subject can be found at all. Personally, I am in favour of solution 1 above, giving each customer a separate database, for these reasons:

  1. Security of database queries. The data of each customer is separated for all other customers, and there is no need to think about that each SQL query or statement must always include a customer identifier. This is a huge issue, because small mistakes, like adding OR-clauses to an SQL query without adding the correct parentheses, can have a dramatic impact, if, for example, you delete data for all customers instead of just one.
  2. Straightforward scalability. The databases of each customer can be spread out of over as many servers as you like (if the SaaS applications are designed in such a way that they use a separate database connection for each database), resulting in very easy scaling when the number of customers grows. Also, it is very easy to redistribute databases to different servers.
  3. Easy backup and restore of data of a single customer. With each customer having its own database, restoring data is simply a case of restoring the backup of a single database (which is pretty easy). Having all customers in a single database, this is very complicated, needing custom tools, or even impossible.
  4. Separate SQL query plans for each customer. Having all customers in the same database can give huge problems with the query plans the database system sets up. Basically, the first query of a specific type run after startup of the server determines the query plan. If other customers have a different data-distribution, this will not work well at all.
  5. Perfomance tuning per customer. There a customers with just a few MBs of data, and customers with TBs of data. Data will be distributed differently for each customer. In each separate database you can tune the indexes, views, and stored procedures to give optimal results for that customer. For example, in SQL Sever, very small databases might need no indexes at all, whereas very large databases might need extensice index tuning, or even things like materialized views.
  6. Version-migration. Updating the SaaS software to a newer version almost always requires changes to the database schema. Having all customers in the same database requires that all customers are always migrated simultaneously. Having a separate database for each customer, you can upgrade customers as you see fit, giving, for example, options such as piloting changes on specific customers.
  7. Database customization. Usually, application customizations for specific customers also require extra tables or columns in the database. Again, having a separate database for each customer, this is much easier to realize, than when all customers are in the same database (and share exactly the same database schema).

Drawbacks of having a separate database for each customer

Of course, almost just as many drawbacks can be found:

  1. Maintenance on many databases. If you are used to having a DBA (Database Administrator) that does lots of manual, daily, maintenance tasks on a single, large, database, this will not work if you have hundreds or thousands of databases. All database-maintenance tasks will need to be full automated (which is a good thing anyway, I think).
  2. Limit on number of databases per server. SQL Server has a hard limit of 32,767 databases per server instance. Long before you reach this number, the number of databases will be limited by the amount of memory and other server resources. However, I have had 30,000 databases (lightly used) running on a single server with 8GB of RAM, so this hard limit is not as theoretical as some people think.
  3. Cross-customer queries. Having all customers in the same database, makes it easier to do queries over all customer (or groups if customers, such as all customers managed by the same accountant). With separate databases you will need to have a separate data-warehouse that collects all data needed over all customers (but having a separate data-warehouse for this is not a bad idea anyway).
  4. Database mirroring. Trying to do real-time database-mirroring on large amount of databases will not work (because of network resources and threads needed for each databases). Microsoft gives approximately 200 as the maximum number of databases you can mirror on a single server. If you have thousands of separate databases, fully-automated log-shipping is currently probably the best way to minimize data-loss.
  5. Direct SAN-level snapshots can not be used. Many SANs (or similar network-based storage solutions) offer quick storage backups on the block-level of the storage. For this to give consistent backups of a database server, all database I/O to the storage needs to stop for a moment. SAN snapshot tools achieve this in cooperation with the Windows Volume Shadow-copy Service (VSS). However, this will stop all I/O to the volume for a few seconds for each database. For thousands of database this is not an options.
    Best solution for this, when having thousands of separate databases, is to first make standard database backups to a separate storage volume, and then do a SAN-snapshot of that backup volume.

Cloud-based relational database service options in regards to number and size of databases

OK, let’s now look at how all of this is relevant when moving the database infrastructure to the cloud. Currently, the cloud-based relational database options are:

  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). This is a service build on top of Amazon’s EC2 (virtual machines) and EBS (virtual hard drives). With it, you get a ready-to-use SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL instance, but without access to the underlying OS or file system.
    • Maximum number of databases per instance is 30.
    • Maximum storage per instance is 1TB for SQL Server, and  3TB for MySQL or Oracle
    • Default maximum number of instances is 10. Need to ask Amazon for more.
    • Price (for SQL Server Web edition) is €100-1500 per instance per month (depending on CPU and memory)
  • Microsoft Azure SQL Database. This cloud-service offers “databases as a service”. So you don’t get a full server instance, but you get completely separate databases.
    • Maximum number of databases is 150. Credit check by Microsoft for more.
    • Maximum database size is 150GB.
    • Price is €4 per month for a database < 100 MB to €170 per month for a database of 150GB.
  • Cloud-based virtual machines running a database server. You can, of course, always run a full database server instance on any cloud-base virtual machine. You then have to set up the storage (RAID), backup, and failover systems yourself, which requires a lot of expertise.

With this, it is clear that the current cloud-based database services have problems for any SaaS meta-database infrastructure:

  • The number of databases you can have in a cloud-database service is quite low, and/or prohibitivly expensive for very many (thousands) of databases.
  • The maximum database size is also quite low, so putting all SaaS customers in a single database is also not an option (besides negating the advantages of having a separate database for each customer that I have mentioned above).

Then, what should you do, if you have thousands of customers for your SaaS application, and want to move your database infrastructure to the cloud? Right now the solution would be:

  • Put your biggest databases (databases with master data, central customer data, or databases of biggest customers) into a cloud-based database service, for biggest reliability and performance.
  • Run all other customer databases on various cloud-based virtual machines with your own DMBS (Database Management System)  configuration.

Conclusion

All in all, the situation with respect to cloud-based relational databases services I not ideal yet, and I hope that both the manageability and pricing of having very many databases in a cloud-based relational database service improves soon.

Iain Banks, world’s greatest living science-fiction writer, is terminally ill

6 April 2013 By in General thoughts Tags: Leave a comment

Most of his readers probably already know this, but I only read about it yesterday: Iain Banks, in my opinion, the greatest science-fiction writer of the last 25 years, has announced that he’s terminally ill, with possibly only a few months to live. Sad news. Best wishes too all.
Having discovered his books 4 years ago, Banks’ books made me read science-fiction again after many, many years of disinterest (I read all the classic science-fiction works by Heinlein, Herbert, Vance, etc. in my teens). Nobody in human history has described in so much detail a utopian society, with all its challenges and possibilities as Banks has done with his “Culture”. His books are in turn very clever, witty and uplifting, and bleak and even hopeless at other times.

Some Banks trademarks, which have become science-fiction standards:

  • The AI characters (in the form of spaceships or drones) are the funniest and smartest in the book.
  • The spaceship names are poetry in themselves. Some of my favorite spaceship names in Banks’ books:
    • “Attitude Adjuster”
    • “All through with this Niceness and Negotiations Stuff”
    • “Me, I’m Counting”

    Too many to mention, this is a full list.

My favorite Banks novels:

  • Against a Dark Background. Great adventure (a classic quest, the search for a superweapon, the “Lazy Gun”), superb heroine and supporting characters. Great, if bleak ending.
  • Use of Weapons. Banks’ masterpiece. Very complex (but extremely rewarding) story. Has Banks’s funniest AI (the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw), and his most enduring heroine (Diziet Sma). A must-read.

Why are so few people using Google’s 2-factor authentication?

5 April 2013 By in Security Tags: , Leave a comment

Google’s 2-factor authentication makes it exponentially harder for your Google account to be hacked, by requiring, after entry of your password, an extra code generated by a smartphone app on a smartphone that was previously linked to your Google account. Since securing your e-mail account is crucial (especially since your e-mail account is used for password retrieval/reset of very many websites and applications), I view it as something everyone with a Google account simply must use, to be able to sleep easy. Especially now you only have to enter the generated security code only once per device ever (and not every 30 days anymore, as was the case previously), I find it pretty painless to use.

However, of all the people I know with a Google account (almost everyone), only one person (besides myself) is actually using Google 2-factor authentication. Why is that? When asked (and some guessing from my side), the following reasons emerge:

  1. Never heard of it. Google 2-factor authentication isn’t very well advertised. It’s not like you get a message every time you log in without using it.
  2. Don’t care about security. Most people I know simply don’t care about online security. They vaguely hear some things about it, but it never comes up that you can actively do something about it. If some hacking event happens to themselves, it’s treated as a fact of life, that you simply can not help.
  3. Too much effort. For many people even using different, strong, passwords for every website, and using a password manager, is already way too much of an effort. Using a smartphone during login, and typing an extra code, is unthinkable.
  4. Setting up Google’s 2-format authentication is too complex. The process is pretty straightforward (you use your smartphone to take a picture of a QR code, to link your smartphone), but still a big hurdle for many people to even consider.
  5. Re-authentication after loss of phone is cumbersome. If you lose or reset your phone (or buy a new one), you first have to unlink your previous phone (using one of the recovery codes, that you hopefully printed out), before you can link your new phone. After having this done once, many people come to the conclusion never to do that again, and don’t re-activate 2-factor authentication.
  6. Application-specific passwords are hard to find and use. Some applications need to have access to your Google account without you being present to login interactively (think mail and calendar applications on desktops and devices). For this, Google has so-called application-specific passwords, which are 16-letter passwords that can be (or at least should be) used for only one application, and are displayed only once by Google (after having used them you can not view them again, you would have to generate a new one).
    Not only is the place to generate these passwords very hard to find (hidden somewhere in your Google account “Security” settings), but the whole concept of what these passwords are, and how they should be used is foreign to most users. Also, because using an application-specific password for only one application is not (and can not be) enforced, it can be a cause of security loopholes.

I am certainly not a security evangelist, but I think that Google has spend a lot of effort in making 2-factor authentication as easy and painless to use as possible (as opposed to other companies, such as Blizzard, where you have to call support, and supply credit-card info etc. to link your account to a new phone), and I think that everyone with a Google account should use it. Still, as the points above indicate, there’s still a long way to go until everyone understands the need for it, and the process becomes easy enough for absolutely everyone to use it.

Some important gotchas when starting with Amazon RDS SQL Server

4 April 2013 By in Application infrastructure Tags: , , 12 Comments

RDS is the relational database service of Amazon Web Services. It is a ready-to-use cloud service: No OS or RAID to set up; you just specify the type of RDBMS you want, the memory/storage sizes, and a few minutes later you have a database instance up and running. The instance has its own (very long) DNS name, and you can access this database server from any place in the world using the standard SQL Server tools, if you give the client IP-addresses access through the “Security Group” linked to the database instance. Currently RDS is offered for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL.

My company (Yuki) is currently using RDS for some smaller projects, and I’m investigating if/how our main database infrastructure could be moved to RDS, so that we can achieve improved scalability, world-wide reach, and lower maintenance costs on our database servers (which are by far the biggest bottlenecks for the web applications of Yuki). In this process I have discovered some important gotchas when using RDS SQL Server, that are not that well advertised, but can be big stumbling blocks:

  1. The sysadmin server role is not available. That’s right, you specificy a master user/password when creating the RDS instance, but this user is not in the sysadmin role; this user does have specific rights to create users and databases and such. Amazon has, of course, done this to lock down the instance. However, this can be a big problem when installing third-party software (such as Microsoft SharePoint) that requires the user to have sysadmin rights on the SQL Server.
  2. The server time is fixed to UTC. The date/time returned by the SQL Server function GETDATE is always in UTC, with no option to change this. This can give a lot of problems if you have columns with GETDATE defaults, or queries that compare date/time values in the database to the current date/time. For us, this currently is a big problem, which would require quite extensive changes in our software.
  3. No SQL Server backup or restore. Because you have no access to the file system (and the backup/restore rights are currently locked down in RDS), you can not move your data to RDS by restoring a backup. You have to use BCP or other export/import mechanisms. It also means, that you can only use the backup/restore that Amazon offers for the complete instance, meaning that you can not backup or restore individual databases. This point could easily be the biggest hurdle for many companies to move to RDS SQL Server.
  4. No storage scaling for SQL Server. Both Oracle and MySQL RDS instance can be scaled to larger storage without downtime, but for SQL Server you are stuck with the storage size you specify when you create the instance. This is a huge issue, since you have to allocate (and pay for!) the storage right at the start, when you have no idea what your requirements will be in a year’s time. This greatly undermines the whole scalability story of AWS.
  5. No failover for SQL Server. Again, both Oracle and MySQL can be installed with “Multi-AZ Deployment”, meaning there is automatic replication and failover to a server in another datacenter in the same Amazon region. No such option for SQL Server, meaning your only option in failure situations is to manually restore a backup that Amazon made of your instance.

All in all, still quite a few shortcomings, and some of which can be hurdles for deployment that can not be overcome. Personally, I love the service, as setting up the hardware and software for a reliable database server is a really complex task, which not very many people have any serious knowledge of. Let’s hope that Amazon keeps up its quick pace of innovation to improve the above points for RDS SQL Server.

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Thoughts about SaaS software architecture

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Thoughts about SaaS software architecture

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