Evergreen SQL Server
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Evergreen SQL Server
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Since we use SSRS then Azure SQL Server is out the door immediately.
Typically I'd love for us to be using the latest and greatest SQL Server but our customers are the ones that cause slow deployments because they won't accept our word for it that a new version of our application is okay they say they want to test it.
On top of that deploying a new version via a just-hit-go-and-it-happens is not where we are at right now. We have 1 installation per customer.
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Steve and all,
By coincidence you mention enjoying Colorado today. I too have loved the mountains since my first visit in the early 60's. Today, at 1:30 PM my wife and I officially end our dream of many years as we leave our log cabin on the Skeleton #1 historic 10 acre mining claim in the Quartz Creek Valley just outside Pitkin in Gunnison County. We are surrounded by beautiful aspen and lodge pole pines 50 to 80 feet high. We have been blessed with a number of years vacationing here and have also had a number of years of full-time summers in this beautiful place 4-wheeling the FS trails and many "merlot time" afternoons with friends on our deck looking out at the Continental Divide just to the east. We're at the moment having coffee in bed on our last morning under the 13k plus foot peak at the head of our valley.
My 42 years in IT and my wife's venture of starting and owning a graphic design studio made it all possible.
One of my sons will still be living here in Colorado as he works in IT supporting remote servers for his company, a position that allows him to also reside in the mountains where he and his family have spent years hiking and skiing.
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Rick
Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) ) -
Evergreen sounds great--until it breaks an existing behavior.
I will freely admit MS goes through a Sisyphean effort to maintain backward compatibility and largely succeed. Well, they did until they started "streamlining" their company and slashed their QA efforts.
True evergreening would require an almost mathematical level of proof in the code's correctness and I'm not so foolish to believe that's possible. SQL Server may not be as complex as Windows but it's at least a distant second. Mix that in with an almost AI level of query optimization and then mix in evergreening?
Good luck with that. 🙂
Don't even get me started on MS's current obsession with being landlords and renting the hardware/software/development/food supply... (laughing). Let's just say it's a disturbing trend and the real incentive for them to evergreen products.
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Peter,
Customers are learning to move faster, but it's a slow process. I expect that in five years, things will have changed a lot, especially a there are no more SPs.
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Rick,
Love Colorado mountains. We are lucky in that we could get a place near Keystone that we rent out, but get to enjoy a bit. Might move up there full time at some point. Lovely looking at the trees and lake.
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Roger,
Certainly MS has incentive to try and rent software, but they also want to be able to evolve the platform and maintain better support. Knowing a lot of people up there, it's a mix of those. The headaches and heartaches of customers still wanting to run old, and insecure technologies, as well as spending time writing software in a way that it can't easily be upgraded with newer libraries, is a problem. I'd argue it's a general problem overall with worms, bots, etc.
Some of our platform needs to regularly evolve and change. While I'd like most of the APIs to remain somewhat secure, I do understand sometimes things might break a bit. I do dislike changing behavior, but I think they're learning to get better at that. They're not likely to remove and features, at least from SQL Server, anymore. Those just won't grow and change with the times.
- Steve Jones - SSC Editor wrote:
Peter, Customers are learning to move faster, but it's a slow process. I expect that in five years, things will have changed a lot, especially a there are no more SPs.
I work a lot with local government and things haven't sped up due to all the regulations and time restrictions. I honestly can't see them getting faster any time soon.
What do you mean by "especially a[sic] there are no more SPs"? To me SPs means stored procedures, and there is no way I can work without them. ORMs are a pain and you always need to go to SPs sooner or later because you simply can't do, e.g. full text search query, via an ORM.
- peter.row wrote:
Since we use SSRS then Azure SQL Server is out the door immediately. Typically I'd love for us to be using the latest and greatest SQL Server but our customers are the ones that cause slow deployments because they won't accept our word for it that a new version of our application is okay they say they want to test it. On top of that deploying a new version via a just-hit-go-and-it-happens is not where we are at right now. We have 1 installation per customer.
Peter, I'm wondering what you meant by saying your use of SSRS precludes using Azure SQL Server. Does SSRS require an on-prem SQL db?
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
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Well you have to use your own custom written authentication DLL with SSRS unless you are running the whole thing on a Windows domain then you need to be able to pass authentication cookies and the like between the SSRS web server and your, in my case, web application.
SSRS creates a SQL Server database to stored it's stuff and there are certificates protecting that. So you need to have you SSRS installation talk to a database on a different system or at least on full on VM on Azure as opposed to some Azure SQL database set-up
Even presuming I'm wrong and you can in fact connect this all up it all adds up to one big house of cards waiting to fall apart. If I had a time machine I would travel back and prevent us from ever going near SSRS with a barge pole. Aside from the complexity and difficulties getting custom security configured (poor documentation, no tools to aid config), Microsoft are clearly abandoning it as they are doing there best to destroy it, such as it was. In SSRS 2016 and higher they:
- changed the security interfaces (re-write of our custom security required)
- only allow 1 install per server, whereas with 2014 and below it was the same as SQL Server instances. Given we install an SSRS instance per customer that means we screwed over again and will need to refactor our entire reporting integration in order to take account of this before we can switch to SQL 2016 or higher
MS is clearly more interested in PowerBI. Not that I'm in any way bitter of course, 😛
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SPs are service packs.
Government often moves slower, though sometimes faster. Strange, but sometimes they are really cutting edge in some groups.
Your group might be different, but I'm speaking from general experience from talking to lots of customers in different industries and organizations.
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Thank you very much, Peter. Now, I'm concerned about SSRS and how we're trying to go to it. I work for a large state agency, so reporting is a huge part of what goes on around here. For the most part what's in place is either some roll-you-own solution written by someone 30 years ago (no, I'm not kidding) and left or retired 15 years ago, or its some very old Crystal Reports. Over time fewer and fewer people here know Crystal. I know SSRS, at least at an intermediate level, so I'm one of those chosen to work on a new report, when it's needed. And we're definitely moving towards SSRS. I wasn't aware of the difficulties with SSRS and Azure. Azure's something that we're also looking at. I think I've got to bring this to my management's attention.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
- Rod at work wrote:
Thank you very much, Peter. Now, I'm concerned about SSRS and how we're trying to go to it. I work for a large state agency, so reporting is a huge part of what goes on around here. For the most part what's in place is either some roll-you-own solution written by someone 30 years ago (no, I'm not kidding) and left or retired 15 years ago, or its some very old Crystal Reports. Over time fewer and fewer people here know Crystal. I know SSRS, at least at an intermediate level, so I'm one of those chosen to work on a new report, when it's needed. And we're definitely moving towards SSRS. I wasn't aware of the difficulties with SSRS and Azure. Azure's something that we're also looking at. I think I've got to bring this to my management's attention.
Definitely worth some double check investigation.
SSRS has been nothing but trouble from a development perspective and thus for me my automatically response to any one asking if we should or should they use SSRS is:
- peter.row wrote:
Definitely worth some double check investigation. SSRS has been nothing but trouble from a development perspective and thus for me my automatically response to any one asking if we should or should they use SSRS is:
I reached that conclusion about SSRS a very long time ago. A couple of highly qualified people (who had computer science doctorates) had been working on getting some reports involving SSRS done for a long time when I joined the company where this was happening. After a (short) while things began to get embarassing because we couldn't provide customers with the reports described in their contracts so I was asked to see if I could help sort this out. My conclusion was that we could write reports in a mixture of t-sql and javascript and provided we didn't allow SSRS to be used we could automate all required reports for very little effort (actually, we would have to use some windows command code too, but that could be handled by SQL Server Agent).
Quite naturally, I said that the company should never attempt to use SSRS again; I think the company has followed that suggestion until now.
Tom
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Unfortunately with a combination of VPN to server + T-SQL + 3rd party partner it is possible to write reports with SSRS and thus we (dev side) are forced to stumble through. We are going to reach a crunch point eventually when SQL Server 2014 goes end of life because that point a major rewrite will be needed to continue supporting it and economic pressures might then take over.
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