Originally Posted by
KRSW
Oddly enough, they split the company and we inherited the time & billing system, but no hardware to run it on. It was a mess. the DB and tables all were fragmented 85-98%. Nothing was documented. I cleaned it up and shoehorned it into a Win10 (updates disabled) XCP-NG VM running MS SQL Express and it's been well-behaved. Not a single reboot in 20 months. Performance, even on a circ-2007 Dell 2950, VM'd, is light years faster than when they had it. Snappy, actually. Even the worst report takes <2 seconds to complete. I'm not sure if it's incompetence or all of the overhead of a full MS server + full MS SQL, although I have my suspicions.
I don't think I've encountered a full SQL instance that couldn't use a reboot every month. One client was funny though. They ran a three node SQL cluster. Every 2-3 months a random node would go offline. The DBA who previously managed their SQL for them said that was normal. I just happened to be there to drop off some goodies (as they were relatively new) and heard this. No patches for at least a year, transaction logs were full (not sure for how long) and they had just rebooted a downed node. Had one of my DBAs purge the logs and set up resourcing restrictions (and other cleanup tasks). Got them to try having my team maintain their cluster for two months (eg, patching with failover, purging logs and other things).... it's been a year and a half since and haven't heard of any issues since.
I've been meaning to learn SQL myself (at least some basic maintenance stuff anyway) but work has been busy and I've been learning other things at the same time... so yeah, one day.
Actually that brings up one thing. Which would you recommend I learn first (need to learn both). XCP-NG or Proxmox? Curious... a lot of the vloggers are flogging proxmox with one or two promoting XCP-NG so interested in finding out what non-vloggers would suggest.