database

New Service Tiers for Azure SQL Databases

Last night I received an email from the Microsoft Azure team with an announcement for a change to the functionality of Azure SQL Databases. At present, there are two service tiers available for Azure SQL Databases, being Web and Business with limits on size relative to each. As anyone who has read my guide on TechNet Gallery entitled Configuring a SQL Azure Sync Group will know, I’m quite into these DBaaS offerings in Azure. Yesterday, they announced in preview the release of three new service tiers for the Azure SQL Databases service.

What’s in the Announcement

The three new tiers announced are named Basic, Standard and Premium. In twelve months time, Microsoft will be ceasing the current Web and Business tiers in favour of these new tiers currently in preview.

  • Basic: Designed for applications with a light transactional workload. Performance objectives for Basic provide a predictable, hourly transaction rate.
  • Standard: Standard is the go-to option for getting started with cloud-designed business applications. It offers mid-level performance and business continuity features. Performance objectives for Standard deliver predictable, per-minute transaction rates.
  • Premium: Designed for mission-critical databases, Premium offers the highest performance levels and access to advanced business continuity features. Performance objectives for Premium deliver predictable, per-second transaction rates. In addition to this, there are going to be revisited scaling limits for the tiers, uptime SLA, backup and recovery options and disaster recovery options.

Basic will have a 2GB limit, an increase from the 1GB limit in the current Web tier. Standard will have a 250GB limit whilst Premium will have a 500GB limit. Restore points for recovering the databases will be available for 24 hours on Basic, 7 days on Standard and 35 days on Premium. All the tiers come with a 99.95% uptime SLA.

New Tiers Pricing

The good news is that if you jump on the band-wagon early, you get reduced pricing during the preview. In an example scenario, using the North Europe Dublin datacentre and billing in Pounds (GBP) on a Pay as You Go tariff, Web and Business edition for a 100MB database is £3.179 per month. A Basic database of the same size is £1.60 per month, Standard is up to £64 per month according to usage and Premium varies wildly between £296 and £2,368 according to usage. It’s interesting to note the high end pricing on Premium which dependant on use can actually work out more expensive than running a SQL Server IaaS virtual machine in Microsoft Azure but that’s the price you pay for design simplicity of DBaaS over SQL Server IaaS.

If we use my blog here at richardjgreen.net as an example where I currently use Web databases, if I moved from Web to Basic under the new tiers, I would see a monthly decrease in cost of about 50%.

What Will Happen to Web and Business

All we know at the moment is that these two legacy tiers will be phased out in twelve months time. There doesn’t seem to be any indication as to how databases would be transitioned from the existing Web and Business tiers over to the new tiers but I would hazard a guess that Web databases will become Basic and Business databases will become Standard.

This above statement is assuming of course that there is compatibility between the current tiers and the new and that the databases will be transitioned seamlessly. I think it would be a bad PR exercise for Microsoft if existing databases were dropped instead of transitioned over to the new tiers as that’s going to put extra work down for customers already consuming these services.

Accessing the Preview Tiers

In order to access the preview tiers, login to your Microsoft Azure Account Portal, the production portal and not the new Preview Portal. You can access this part of the Azure portal at https://account.windowsazure.com if you haven’t accessed it before.

From here, click the Preview Features link in the top navigation.

Azure Portal Preview Features

From the Preview Features page, scroll down until you can see the New Service Tiers for SQL Databases option.

SQL New Tiers Try Now

Click the Try It Now button alongside the preview feature entry.

SQL New Tiers Add Feature

You will be presented with a dialog to select which subscription you wish to enable that feature for. I only have one subscription so I only have a single selection in the drop down. Click the tick button in the bottom right once you have the correct subscription selected. You will be taken back to the previous page once it’s done and you will be sent a welcome email for the preview.

SQL New Tiers Active

The preview features page in the portal will update to also show a caption under the New Service Tiers for SQL Databases button You Are Active to show that you are participating in this preview service.

With this enabled, we can head over to the Management Portal using either the Portal link in the upper right or by navigating to https://manage.windowsazure.com to try out the feature.

SQL New Database Custom Create

From the Management Portal in Microsoft Azure, I have clicked into SQL Databases and selected the New Custom Create option. As you can see in the new database wizard, in addition to the current tiers for Web and Business, we can now select from our three preview tiers, Basic, Standard and Premium also.

SQL Database Features Support

The current crop of SQL Databases support the Automatic Backup and Sync features. I haven’t had a chance to explore the support for these with the new tiers yet but I’ll be back soon with just that information. I will be interested to find this out for myself as transitioning from Web to Basic would save me on my monthly Azure bills but if Sync isn’t available in this tier then I’m probably going to be paying more to use Standard.

Restoring Client Computer Backup Database in Windows Home Server 2011

Quite sometime ago (probably about two months now), the primary drive on my Windows Home Server 2011 was giving me issues due to a new device driver I installed. Nothing got me going with ease: Last Known Good Configuration, Safe Mode, nothing. The problem lied in the fact that the server wouldn’t acknowledge that the OS disk was a boot partition, and after leaving it to attempt to repair the boot files by itself, which for the record, I don’t think I’ve ever seen work, I took to it manually.

Launching the Recovery Console command prompt from the installation media, I tried the good old commands that have served me well in the past for Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines I had to repair, bootrec and bootsec, but nothing worked, so I was left with only one option to re-install the OS. I wasn’t concerned about loosing personal data that is stored on a separate RAID volume, but I was concerned about my client backups which were stored on the same volume.

Using a USB attached hard disk, I manually copied out the Client Computer Backups folder, then rebuilt the operating system. I don’t keep active backups of the Home Server operating system because the Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server 2008 R2 isn’t that hot. It doesn’t support GPT partitions over 2TB which obviously is an

Once installed, Windows Home Server sets up the default shares and folders including the Client Computer Backups. The critical thing here is that no clients can start a backup to the server before you complete these steps. Once a client starts a backup to the server, it creates the new databases and files for the server, ruining the chances of importing the existing structure.

From the new OS installation, open the directory where the Client Computer Backups live. The default location is C:ServerFoldersClient Computer Backups, but I had moved mine to D:ServerFoldersClient Computer Backups. Once you’ve found the directory, copy across all of the files I had previously copied from the burnt install of Windows and overwrite any files that it requests.

Once completed, restart the server. This will restart all of the Windows Home Server services responsible for running the Dashboard and the Client Computer Backups. Once the restart has completed, open the Dashboard and select the Computers tab where you normally view the computer health states and backups. On first inspection, it looks as though you have no clients and no backups, but look more closely and you will se a collapsed group called Archived Computers. Expand this group and you will see all of your clients listed and all of their associated backups will be listed if you select the Restore Files option for a computer.

The thing to point out here is that these backups will remain disassociated from the clients. Once you re-add a client to the server and commence a backup, it will be listed as a normal computer and the Archived Computer object for it will also remain listed. This is because the server generates GUIDs for the backup files based on a combination of the client identity and the server identity and because the reinstallation of the operating system will cause a new GUID to be generated, they are different. This isn’t a problem for me, but I’ve read a number of posts on the TechNet forums at Microsoft where people have had trouble locating the Archived Computers group in the Dashboard interface and think that they’ve lost everything which clearly isn’t the case.