Azure Container Instances are still in Preview and not officially available for Windows yet, which made me smile. It took me a while to figure out how to get this working so I thought I’d share what I’ve found. Containers are great for lightweight testing of code before deployment to production servers because they can be created so quickly and they give the same environment to test in very reliably. Now that Microsoft is offering container instances in Azure it means you don’t have to worry about provisioning and configuring your own docker host/cluster.

Why use Windows Containers? When creating database applications we need consistency in all our environments to ensure quality releases. Traditionally developers might have their own instance of SQL Server on their workstation to develop against. Database projects would be created in SSDT and pushed to source control when ready for testing. If you’re not using SSDT for database development already, then you should seriously consider it to make your life easier and increase the quality of your releases.

As part of automation of database and application deployments, it makes sense to be able to create new SQL Server instances quickly and with minimal resources. I have already explored containers and written about it on this blog, but I’d like to turn your attention to setting up SQL Server on Windows Server Core for those of you that run SQL Server on-premise or within VMs in the cloud. In a domain environment it should be pretty simple to just create a PowerShell session to your target Windows Server where your account is a local administrator and then simply run setup at the command line to install SQL Server, right?

Clean Code I am a big proponent of clean code. I use PowerShell a lot for automation, and want code to be clean. You are automating everything, right? If not, please see a slide from a recent meetup: Disturbing For me, clean code in PowerShell means (and not limited to): Small self-contained functions that have a single responsibility Number of arguments to a function kept as small as possible Consistent formatting No duplication of code Modules that hide internal functions, and only expose what’s needed Common Parameters One way to make code a bit cleaner is to make use of PowerShell’s common parameters.

How to work on a feature branch but pull in later commits from another branch? On a client site last week the question was raised: I want to work on a feature for a project which will take longer than other people merging their branches into the dev branch. I therefore want to merge any changes on the dev branch into mine, test my changes before pushing back to the dev branch, and then and ultimately master for a release.

How to move a replication subscriber to a new server with no downtime to the publisher? In a recent data centre migration for a client we had a problem where we needed to move a subscriber to a new data centre without incurring any downtime to the publisher or loss of data after the subscription migration. The application was sending hundreds of transactions per second to the publisher. An additional complication was an upgrade to SQL Server 2016 from SQL Server 2008 R2 on the subscriber.

Is SQL Server in a container faster than a VM? I briefly looked at SQL Server containers when Windows Server 2016 was released. Containers offer the ability for rapid provisioning, and denser utilization of hardware because the container shares the base OS’s kernel. There is not a need for a Hyper-Visor layer in between. As a recap for those that are not up speed with containers, the traditional architecture of databases in a VM is like so: