Transcript Session Title

Windows Azure:
Is the Relational
Database Dead?
Benjamin Day
http://benday.com
Who am I?
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Owner, Benjamin Day Consulting, Inc.
– Email: [email protected]
– Web: http://www.benday.com
– Blog: http://blog.benday.com
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Trainer, Consultant
– Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server
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Microsoft MVP for VSTS
Microsoft VSTS/TFS Customer Advisory Council
Microsoft Cloud Services Advisory Group
Leader of Beantown.NET INETA User Group
Agenda
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Big thanks to
– Steve Marx @ Microsoft
– Manuvir Das @ Microsoft
– David Aiken @ Microsoft
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Is the relational database dead?
What is Windows Azure?
Develop Your Application
Deploy To Staging and Production
Some Stuff To Think About
Is the relational database dead?
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It depends.
(Probably not.)
Cloud will change everything.
Relational database “best practices” are
probably dead…
…at least in the cloud.
AZURE
The Azure Platform
The Azure Platform
The “cloud” in Cloud Services?
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Think data-center somewhere on the internet
Allows you to run your app
Allows you to read and write data
Ok. So what’s Windows Azure?
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Microsoft’s “cloud”
– Every cloud has an Azure lining?
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Custom version of Windows
– Optimized for utility computing applications
– Always runs virtualized on the Azure Fabric
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Azure Fabric
– Runs instances of your apps
– Handles “everything”
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Azure Storage
Azure SDK for Visual Studio
Why Azure?
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“I’ve got my awesome data-center so…”
No more worrying about…
– Buying, configuring, maintaining hardware
– Buying, configuring, maintaining the operating system
– Network infrastructure
•Routers, Switches, Load Balancers
– Your data-center’s power and internet connections
– Failovers
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Worry less about…
– App deployment
– Capacity planning
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Focus on writing your app
Simple Scale Out
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Changes in traffic
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Need more
servers?
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Need fewer
servers?
I want everything…
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…and it should be easy.
Azure let’s you worry about writing your app
Don’t have to learn a whole bunch of new
stuff
Leverage your existing dev skills
Azure: The Developer View
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Write it in Visual Studio
– New project types
– Debug your code
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.NET, ASP.NET, WCF, IIS7, LINQ
Azure Storage
– Database in the cloud
– (with a few caveats)
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Desktop development versions of
– Azure Fabric
– Azure Storage
Demo 1: Hello, World
Hello, World: Discuss.
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Doesn’t look like much but…
– that’s “internet scale”-able
– Highly available
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Mostly stuff you already know
Debugging In The Cloud
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We can debug a service in Visual Studio
How do you debug a service that has been
deployed?
– Answer: you don’t
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Logging is the answer
RoleManager.WriteToLog(eventLogName,
message)
– Event log name values: Error, Information, Warning,
Debug, Critical
Demo 1.1: Hello World + Logging
AZURE STORAGE
Azure Storage
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Simple database in the cloud
– Tables (aka. “structured storage”)
– Blobs
– Queues
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You don’t worry about replication
Scales like nobody’s business
Development version
– DevelopmentStorage.exe
– Uses SQL Server Express
Table Storage
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Every row has RowKey & Partition Key
RowKey = primary key
PartitionKey
– Helps you tell Azure how to scale your data
– You have to think about how you’ll be querying
– By State? By Hour? Other?
RowKey
PartitionKey
FirstName
LastName
1
MA
Ben
Day
2
MA
John
Malkovich
3
WA
Bill
Gates
4
CA
Steve
Jobs
PartitionKey
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Your partitions could be on different servers
Best practice: If you know your PartitionKey,
add it to the WHERE clause
No PartitionKey in the WHERE  insane table
scans
Recommendation: More partitions is
(probably) better
Think hard about your partition key in the
beginning
– Else, roll your own re-partitioning
Column Data Types
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Partition key and Row key
– String (up to 64KB)
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Other properties
– String (up to 64KB)
– Binary (up to 64KB)
– Bool
– DateTime
– GUID
– Int
– Int64
– Double
Demo 2: Azure Table Storage
RELATIONAL VS CLOUD
What is “relational”
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Tables, Rows, & Columns
– All rows in the table have the same column
structure
– You design the database BEFORE you add the
data
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Relationships between the tables
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Constraints on the columns
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Normalization eliminates duplicate data
– Data “nuggets” stored in one place only
– Makes it clear what the definitive version is
Relational in your app
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Data is organized for the sake of the data
rather than the sake of the app
– App is temporary but Schema is forever.
– Represents itself as normalization and
relationships between the tables
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Scales nicely on a single node but going to
a cluster, it gets ugly
Relational DB Engine Does A Lot
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Non-trivial
SELECT p.FirstName, p.LastName,
ph.PhoneNumber
FROM
Person p
LEFT JOIN
Phone ph
ON
p.Id = ph.PersonId
WHERE
p.LastName LIKE 'D%'
Performance Issues in Relational
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Avoiding duplication can cause
performance issues
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De-normalizing
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If you de-normalize and duplicate some
data:
– you can lower the number of required to build an
"object"
– You can lower the amount of "heavy lifting" that
the db has to do to retrieve your data
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That JOIN isn't easy
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Indexes help but it still is a lot of work
Why Stored Procedures? (1 of 2)
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Abstraction between the app & data
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Externalize the queries
– Remove them from the code
– Makes the queries live with the data  more
"database me me me!"
Why Stored Procedures? (2 of 2)
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Security
– lock down direct access to the tables
– Users get rights to specific procs
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Performance
– Less compelling: cached execution plan
• Largely irrelevant after SQL Server 7
– More compelling: the query logic is near the
data
Stored Procedures In The Cloud
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Azure can distribute physical location of data
by partition key
– Is the stored proc near the data anymore?
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(Well, that pretty much wraps it up for stored
procedures.)
What you won’t get in Azure Storage
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Stored Procedures
Views
Triggers
Foreign Keys
Database enforced referential integrity
User defined indexes
– (Maybe later.)
While I’ve “dissed” relational…
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I’m not saying “skip best practices.”
Don’t put everything in the same table
You’ll still have relationships between tables
– …the relationships just won’t be enforced by the DB
THE VERDICT?
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
OK. MOVING ON.
MORE THAN JUST ASPX
Utility Compute without a UI
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Azure uses the concept of “Roles”
Hello, World used a “Web Role”
The other role is a “Worker Role”
– Think windows service in the cloud
Web & Worker
Demo 3: Worker Role and a Queue
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In a web role, create an ASP.NET page
– Creates a queue
– Writes to a queue
– Gets queue depth
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Worker Role
– Reads the queue
– “Processes” the message
DEPLOYMENT
Demo 4: Deploy To The Cloud
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Change the storage config to use production
servers
MISCELLANEOUS
Things to think about
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No foreign keys
No triggers
No stored procedures
In Table storage, strings can only be 64k
– You’ll need to use a mix of Blob and Tables
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Think hard about what config values you put
in web.config/app.config vs
ServiceConfiguration.cscfg
The Big Questions
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When?
– Sometime in 2009
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An actual Service Level Agreement (SLA)
More data-centers
– Now in US only
– Global at go-live
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What will it cost?
– It will depend on what you use
More resources
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My Blog
– http://blog.benday.com
– Sample code
– More Azure content to come…
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Steve Marx’s blog
– http://blog.smarx.com/
– Evangelist for the Azure team
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Azure.com
Final questions?
Who am I?

Owner, Benjamin Day Consulting, Inc.
– Email: [email protected]
– Web: http://www.benday.com
– Blog: http://blog.benday.com

Trainer, Consultant
– Visual Studio Team System, Team Foundation Server




Microsoft MVP for VSTS
Microsoft VSTS/TFS Customer Advisory Council
Microsoft Cloud Services Advisory Group
Leader of Beantown.NET INETA User Group