Windows Azure: Is the Relational Database Dead?Benjamin Dayhttp://benday.com

Who am I?

Owner, Benjamin Day Consulting, Inc.– Email: benday@benday.com– 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

Agenda Big thanks to

– Steve Marx @ Microsoft– Manuvir Das @ Microsoft– David Aiken @ Microsoft

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?

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?

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?

Microsoft’s “cloud”– Every cloud has an Azure lining?

Custom version of Windows– Optimized for utility computing applications– Always runs virtualized on the Azure Fabric

Azure Fabric– Runs instances of your apps– Handles “everything”

Azure Storage Azure SDK for Visual Studio

Why Azure? “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

Worry less about…– App deployment– Capacity planning

Focus on writing your app

Simple Scale Out

Changes in traffic

Need more servers?

Need fewer servers?

I want everything…

…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

Write it in Visual Studio– New project types– Debug your code

.NET, ASP.NET, WCF, IIS7, LINQ Azure Storage

– Database in the cloud– (with a few caveats)

Desktop development versions of– Azure Fabric– Azure Storage

Demo 1: Hello, World

Hello, World: Discuss.

Doesn’t look like much but…– that’s “internet scale”-able– Highly available

Mostly stuff you already know

Debugging In The Cloud

We can debug a service in Visual Studio How do you debug a service that has

been deployed?– Answer: you don’t

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

Simple database in the cloud– Tables (aka. “structured storage”)– Blobs– Queues

You don’t worry about replication Scales like nobody’s business Development version

– DevelopmentStorage.exe– Uses SQL Server Express

Table Storage 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 LastName1 MA Ben Day2 MA John Malkovich3 WA Bill Gates4 CA Steve Jobs

PartitionKey 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

Partition key and Row key– String (up to 64KB)

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” Tables, Rows, & Columns

– All rows in the table have the same column structure

– You design the database BEFORE you add the data

Relationships between the tables Constraints on the columns Normalization eliminates duplicate

data– Data “nuggets” stored in one place only– Makes it clear what the definitive version

is

Relational in your app 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 Scales nicely on a single node but

going to a cluster, it gets ugly

Relational DB Engine Does A Lot

Non-trivial SELECT p.FirstName, p.LastName,

ph.PhoneNumberFROMPerson pLEFT JOINPhone phONp.Id = ph.PersonIdWHEREp.LastName LIKE 'D%'

Performance Issues in Relational Avoiding duplication can cause

performance issues De-normalizing 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 That JOIN isn't easy Indexes help but it still is a lot of work

Why Stored Procedures? (1 of 2)

Abstraction between the app & data 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)

Security– lock down direct access to the tables– Users get rights to specific procs

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

Azure can distribute physical location of data by partition key – Is the stored proc near the data anymore?

(Well, that pretty much wraps it up for stored procedures.)

What you won’t get in Azure Storage

Stored Procedures Views Triggers Foreign Keys Database enforced referential integrity User defined indexes

– (Maybe later.)

While I’ve “dissed” relational…

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

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

In a web role, create an ASP.NET page– Creates a queue– Writes to a queue– Gets queue depth

Worker Role– Reads the queue– “Processes” the message

DEPLOYMENT

Demo 4: Deploy To The Cloud

Change the storage config to use production servers

MISCELLANEOUS

Things to think about

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 Think hard about what config values you

put in web.config/app.config vs ServiceConfiguration.cscfg

The Big Questions

When?– Sometime in 2009

An actual Service Level Agreement (SLA)

More data-centers– Now in US only– Global at go-live

What will it cost?– It will depend on what you use

More resources

My Blog– http://blog.benday.com– Sample code– More Azure content to come…

Steve Marx’s blog– http://blog.smarx.com/ – Evangelist for the Azure team

Azure.com

Final questions?

Who am I?

Owner, Benjamin Day Consulting, Inc.– Email: benday@benday.com– 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