Wow, what a week last week was.

The biggest thing that happened was that I got a session at SQL Saturday Iceland! They had loads of submissions and could only pick around 20 so very chuffed to have been one of those selected, cue smug face.

The event is on the 17th of March in Reykjavik and I’ll be talking about one of my favourite subjects, containers. I’ve pretty much written the presentation at this point but I’ve still got over a month to polish it. One thing I am going to do is get my demos down, I’ve got an Azure account so I’ll be building an environment there to use. However from the advice that I’ve been given I’ll also be recording videos of each of the demos so if the presentation technical gremlins raise their heads I won’t have to worry.

It feels like I’ve lived and breathed containers over the last year, it’s a subject that I feel passionate about. I don’t want to go over the top but I think that they’re a game changer, especially when it comes to Dev & Test environments.

Say you have 20 dev and test guys, all working with apps that reference databases in SQL Server. Now whenever a release goes out to production, those environments will also have to be updated to make sure that everyone is working on the same version. There’s tonnes of software out there to automate deployments but what if you could run a powershell script and bam! everyone is on the working on exactly the same version of the database(s) within minutes.

That’s what containers give you, the ability to quickly and easily spin up custom instances of SQL Server.

Another good example of when containers come into their own is patching. Microsoft now recommends applying every CU to your production environment. Are you really going to have to get all those other instances of SQL up to the same patch level as well? You should, no point in testing on one patch level of SQL and then deploying to another.

If your dev guys are using containers it’s no problem. They can blow away their old containers and deploy new ones at the higher patch level. Great stuff eh?

There are other advantages, hey there are disadvantages too but I’m not going to go into all of them here. You’ll have to come to my session

Have a good week!