CloudSQL For SQL Server — Features, Limitation, Glitches

GCP released its official CloudSQL flour of Microsoft SQL Server in Beta mode. The blog written when it is in Beta Mode. All the updates will be append to this blog.

Credit: pcmarket

Last year in GCP Next, they announced the CloudSQL for SQL Server and now its in Beta mode and available on US, EU, or Asia regions. In this blog, we are going to see what is great in this, Limitations and some glitches.

Most of us already know about what is CloudSQL and its functioning, so Im just skipping its intro.

SQL Server:

CloudSQL supports only SQL sever 2017 (web, standard, enterprise and Express).

The maximum instance type would be 64 CPU and 416GB memory.

Maximum storage is 30TB.

You can backup the database to GCS (Only FULL backup is supported)

You can restore the backup files from GCS (again Only FULL backups are supported)

Storage and Network level encryption enabled by default.

Features:

This is one amazing thing I noticed in CloudSQL. Its fully hosted on Linux. You can see this by running the below command.

select @@version Microsoft SQL Server 2017 (RTM-CU16) (KB4508218) - 14.0.3223.3 (X64) Jul 12 2019 17:43:08 Copyright (C) 2017 Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Edition (64-bit) on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS)

You can control the max memory for SQL server using Database flags.

Also you can set the max worker threads for parallelism.

The storage is auto scalable. (as like MySQL and PostgreSQL)

High availability supported. Unlike AWS RDS, CloudSQL is using Disk based replication to maintain the high availability. If the node is down for 60 Seconds then the automatic failover will be triggered.

Credit: GCP Doc

Automated backups are supported. Its a disk level backup and always incremental. Also every backup will be stored in 2 regions If the continent doesn’t have two regions, then the backup will be stored on the nearest region.

If the continent doesn’t have two regions, then the backup will be stored on the nearest region. Default Metrics in StackDriver: Memory usage, CPU, storage, IOPS, and network in/out bytes.

SQL server Agent is supported.

GCP’s SQL proxy is available for SQL server as well.

Limitations & Glitches:

We can’t restore the Differential or transaction log backups. This leads a high downtime while migrating the SQL server database to CloudSQL. No Database Mails — We can’t send emails from CloudSQL or Agent job failed notifications. No Active Directory Authentication. BULK Insert is not supported. FILESTREAM not supported. All the databases are in same disk which I don’t like. Because it makes the disk throttle. No Mirroring, Log Shipping, Alwayson and Transactional replication.

References:

Conclusion:

For an Organization, who is having windows workload and SQL server database and if they don’t have any SQL Server DBA, then its a great Service for them. Still we are exploring its features and bugs. We’ll keep this blog updated.