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If I run SQL Server 2008 on an EC2 instance.... what are my options for the location of the mdf ?

If it is in the local instance storage, I can lose it when the instance reboots.

(My understanding is that the instance can reboot once or twice a year.)

What are my options? What am I missing?

Thanks!

2 Answers 2

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Amazon says to use EBS http://aws.amazon.com/running_databases/

2013 Revision:

If using a plain EC2 instance, the answer is still to use EBS as the storage for the db files. However, in my (relatively extensive) testing of this setup, write performance of SQL Server was much lower than desired when using "plain" EBS. There is now a special "fast IO" EBS that should address this: http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2012/08/fast-storage-aws/

Today, Amazon offers RDS, which offers hosted SQL Server. This is a very nice offering, but it is also very restricted in its real world use (e.g. you cannot use third party tools on your db server, etc.). As a result, I have not tested RDS (though I would like to).

So it comes down to a price / performance story. To get full control over your SQL IO environment, you need dedicated hardware. Depending on what you need from EC2, having dedicated hardware may make sense.

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We have it on EBS

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