Data Persistence In A Web Hosted World

Jeff Ammons The Atlanta Journal-Constitution GGMUG.com Developer/DBA GGMUG.com President Gwinnett, Georgia, Microsoft User Group 2nd Thursday, 6:30 PM Gwinnett Tech Blog: http://ammonsonline.com/jeffablog

Agenda Define Hosted Environment Explore Data Persistence Options DBA Tasks With Hosted SQL Server Data Access With LINQ and Entity Framework

What Is Hosted Environment? Web Shared Server Managed By Hosting Company

What’s Included? Web Server File Storage Database Bandwidth Email

Examples GoDaddy Hostgator DiscountASP.net Bizhostnet.com

Who Is This Environment For? Start-ups Non-profit organizations Personal use

Why Choose A Hosted Env? Lost cost ($5-$20/month) Quick Start Fewer People Required No hardware to buy No hardware to maintain No server room

Challenges Server Access Server Options Server Load Dude, Where’s My Data? Dude, Who Can See My Data?

Microsoft vs FOSS: The FOSS Advantage Lots of FOSS based sites (LAMP) Lots of FOSS sample code Zero start-up cost MS stack seen as ugly and corporate-looking

Microsoft vs FOSS: The Empire Strikes Back Asp.Net MVC JQuery supported OFFICIALLY Visual Studio Express Edition BizSpark WebsiteSpark You CAN achieve zero start-up cost You CAN make good looking sites

Asp.Net Options SharePoint WebForms MVC ASP.NET

Data Persistence Options MySQL SQL Server File Based XML JSON

Why Not MySQL? .Net naturally works better with SQL Server LINQ To SQL works ONLY with SQL Server Entity Framework support for MySQL is dodgy This is NOT MySQL Saturday…

SQL Server $15/month = Unlimited 200 MB DBs Good basic set of functionality Choice of access methods LINQ To SQL Entity Framework ADO Etc.

SQL Server and MySQL

What’s Missing? Missing In Action Alternative Agent Wish You Had Agent SSIS SSRS SSAS Wish You Had Agent Stored Procs ASP App Perhaps With Silverlight, why not? None

Types Of Access Direct Access Web Admin SQL Server Management Studio Expose YOUR database directly to the Internet Web Admin Primitive tools CYDB

Typical DBA Tasks Set Up Backups/Restores Imports/Exports Schemas Tables Indexes Views Stored Procedures Backups/Restores Imports/Exports

Demo Time

Developer/DBA Developers vs DBAs Objects vs Relational Data ORM

What Is LINQ? Language INtegrated Query SQL-like language construct for .Net Joins Tables Objects Both Aggregation Selection

Example LINQ Query var orderedModuleList = from module in itemList.getList() orderby module.Name select module;

LINQ To Lots Of Stuff LINQ To Entities LINQ To SQL LINQ To Objects LINQ To XML

File System Options POCO (Built-in .Net Serialization) XML

Why? Why? Why? Not ALL apps need relational databases SMALL datasets Burn the heretic!!! SMALL datasets Lots of Readers/Few Publishers Blog Informational site Personal site Excessive DB Traffic

Example Custom ASP.Net Membership Provider Basic log-on info Works great with 10-30,000 users Total DOG with 500,000 users No calls to DB server Most start-ups would KILL to get 10,000 users

Demo Time

Goals For Your Project Website itself Web app others can use

Strategy 1: SQL Server Your hosting plan gives you all the DBs you need Latency of calling DB server is acceptable Don’t kill yourself by calling DB too much Cache, Cache, Cache

Strategy 2: File System Now, SQL Server Later Repository Pattern LINQ lets you query object collections Switch to SQL Server if you grow Not as big a deal as it once was SQL Server now pretty cheap

Helpful Links MSDN: Dynamic Management Views and Functions http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188754.aspx SQLServerCentral http://www.sqlservercentral.com/ SQLBlog http://sqlblog.com/

Helpful Queries SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'), SERVERPROPERTY ('productlevel'), SERVERPROPERTY ('edition') select top 100 * from sys.dm_tran_locks select login_name, count(1) from sys.dm_exec_sessions group by login_name order by count(1) desc SELECT creation_time ,cursor_id ,name ,c.session_id ,login_name FROM sys.dm_exec_cursors(0) AS c JOIN sys.dm_exec_sessions AS s ON c.session_id = s.session_id WHERE DATEDIFF(mi, c.creation_time, GETDATE()) > 5;