Difference between RDS and installing Windows server AND SQL Server

  • Just starting to play around with this to see what it is as my boss wants me to give him some feedback on how we might use this.

    My question becomes.. if we create the RDS just go through the wizard to create a SQL Server S Edition instance do you get the ability to log into the actual Windows server?

    What is the real difference between creating just the SQL Server install versus going with the EC2 Virutual Server and installing the option of Windows 2012 WITH SQL Server 2012 S. Edition?

    Also, for the install it forces you to create an Admin account.... so... do you not get the ability to set the 'sa' password?

  • Best I can tell from doing more digging is that RDS is simply SQL Server as a service and that is it. The other is like creating a VM with SQL Server preinstalled.

  • RDS is amazons managed database solutions. So for SQL server you get a SQL instance with very limited functionality. You also cannot access a lot of the system catalogs \ DMV's etc. However you can scale the CPU \ Memory of the instance and the storage \ IOPS with a few simple clicks and very little downtime. It also supports read replica's and multi-AZ support for DR, offloading read activities etc.

    Its intended for people that don't want to worry about the nitty gritty of administration. Like any other SQL Server you need to make sure your queries are well optimized, if you go outside your provisioned IOPS due to queries with poor code or a bad execution plan its very easy to bring an RDS instance to its knees.

    EC2 offers the ability to build hosted VM's in Amazons infrastructure. With EC2 you pick your base system from a AMI (Amazon Machine Image) which could be windows server \ ubuntu linux etc. You then install what you need inside the image.

    For SQL server both have there issues so you have to be very clear on what you want to achieve before picking one or the other. Licensing is also not automatically included in either solution so you need to make sure you are covered there as well.

    MCITP SQL 2005, MCSA SQL 2012

  • Great. Thanks, much appreciated.

  • Adding to above Notes:

    We decided to go with our own microsoft license and installed SQL on AWS. I see that services cannot be brought up immediately due to resource constraint. I have to start SQL in Delayed Start and it works.

    -Peace.

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