Less than a week to go until SQLSaturday Iceland now, it’s going to be a busy couple of months for me but am looking forward to it. I’ll get my slides and demos uploaded here at some point.

I’ve been debating whether or not to do demos live when I’m speaking. In the past I’ve everything live but certain presentations make that a little risky. I’ve done lightening talks where I’ve performed the demo then and there but that’s because I know that the risk of something going wrong is minimal. I’m working on a local instance of SQL and am not depending on anything else (e.g. – an internet connection).

It also depends on what the demo actually is, if it’s code based then running it live means that you can talk about the code but if the code is simple and the demo is more about the process, running it live really doesn’t add anything to the table.

For my session on containers, the demos will be videos. This is in part to reduce the risk of something going wrong but mainly it’s because the code is very simple, what’s happening when I’m running it is what I want to talk about. A video demo means that I don’t have to concentrate on typing the code (you really should never type in demos, copy & paste) and can talk about what’s happening.

Doing it this way will be beneficial as I can focus entirely on the audience and not be staring at my screen. I want to engage with the audience as much as possible and make the session as good as it can be.

Have a good week!

Last week Docker announced the availablity of Docker Enterprise Edition. The existing version of Docker that I’ve been using has now been renamed to the Docker Community Edition.

So what does this mean for us Windows people hacking around with Docker on our local Windows 10 boxes? Very little it seems. The Community Edition will have access to the full Docker platform and (if needed) can be added to with paid-for addons from the Docker cloud. I haven’t had a chance to look over all the paid offerings but they seem to be mainly cloud based services, so I doubt I’ll need them (at the moment).

The Enterprise Edition is interesting as it raises the question, is Docker suitable for SQL Server in production environments? Now, I’m a big fan of Docker and have been using it extensively in my dev/test environments but I’m still not sure about production.

If you think about the advantages running SQL Server in containers brings; simple to setup, quick to deploy; are they relevant to production? I want to spend time setting up my 24/7 critical SQL Server instance, speed of build doesn’t really matter.

There may be other advantages that Docker Enterprise Edition brings so I’m definitely going to check it out but there’ll have to be something pretty good in there to convince me SQL Server containers are for production.

Have a good week!