CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azureazure-sql-databaseazure-virtual-machine
user351711
user351711

Reputation: 3301

Windows Azure Virtual Machines Are They Worth It/Full Text Indexing

We have a fairly large application running on a small web farm with Sql Server replication. Lately the sales team have become obsessed with wanting to sell the solution as a cloud based product as they think it sounds better.

We have begun migrating our dynamic media content to azure blob storage for images, videos, etc. but we cannot move to Azure with Sql Azure as it is as we use features such as FileStream and Full Text Indexing for searching documents. Also from what I can understand you cannot bring backups locally and run in Sql Server which is a fundamental part of our development process and bug fixing.

One suggestion is to move to the Virtual Machines that are in preview when they are released, I guess with all my research I am struggling to see if that is going to be of benefit to us over our current setup. I can see the advantages of blob storage for geo-replication as we have users in China, Mexico and India.

My question is is it worth going to a virtual machine in Windows Azure over our current setup, if it's not does anyone know any dates when Sql Azure will support fulltext indexing?

Many thanks for any thoughts/your own experiences with this.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1040

Answers (2)

Bart Czernicki
Bart Czernicki

Reputation: 3683

I do agree about the Lucene recommendation, however to answer your question on SQL Server and Azure :)....

  • SQL Server on VMs works pretty well, right now it is a BYO-License model...so keep that in mind. You can tweak everything, use the SKU you need, set up AlwaysOn (SQL 2012) or clustering etc. Format your drives the way you want them, set processor affinity etc. etc. etc. :)
  • Check out some of the IaaS BUILD 2012 videos from this past week: http://channel9.msdn.com. Microsoft is certifying SQL Server as part of the software to run on the IaaS platform. If you know a bit about IaaS, you get some gallery options now to pick starting images from...would be an educated guess expect SQL Server 2012 image on there with the license priced in for you (Microsoft can do that because they own SQL Server, Amazon/RackSpace have to rely on open source)
  • I/O can be a performance bottleneck now...IOPs on a striped drive is about 2x a 15k SCSI drive...they are going to improve that in the future (once again there are hacks to get this to work better).
  • Azure has a bit to catch up to Amazon in the dedicated specialized VMs (high I/O, high memory, high CPU). I am guessing from your solution (search/FILESTREAM) you would want high I/O..Amazon AWS has this right now and specialized storage on SSDs etc.

I am not sure if Full Text Search is coming to SQL Azure (PaaS version of SQL Server). If you have Full Text Search you probably are going to be tweaking Trace Flags, need constant communication with Blob Storage with high I/O...formatting the drive to the default 64kb allocation unit is probably OK for data drives but not for FILESTREAM etc.

Upvotes: 2

Leon Cullens
Leon Cullens

Reputation: 12476

I think that they are working on FTS on SQL Azure, but the release date isn't known. You can use Lucene.NET with SQL Azure to create a full text index from you database, you can simple update the index with the content of your database once every x minutes (or hours/days).

More info: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2367.how-to-use-lucene-net-with-windows-azure-sql-database-en-us.aspx

Upvotes: 2

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