Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > Guides > Design Guide—SQL Server 2022 Database Solution with Object Storage on Dell Hardware Stack > Summary
This document discusses the key insights gathered by Dell solutions engineers during their setup of the S3 Data Analytics solution. This document also explains process of creating a solution for using ECS for enterprises to seamlessly create their own setups that use data virtualization. By combining S3 compatible object storage with Microsoft SQL Server, it is possible to enhance data protection and reduce storage costs. In this solution, PolyBase was used while connecting to external storage with S3 protocol to perform queries with external data including the backup and restore operations for cloud storage. The ability to connect and query data present on external object storage was also validated using OPENROWSET and SQL Server external tables. This offers an example of data virtualization where users can directly query unstructured or semi-structured data not located internally in SQL server.
This setup was validated for both Linux containers running in an OpenShift cluster and on Virtualized Windows Machines in a VMware High Availability cluster providing deeper insights into the practicality of such setups.
The recently introduced T-SQL functions such as GREATEST, LEAST, DATE_BUCKET, GENERATE_SERIES, STRING_SPLIT, FIRST_VALUE AND LAST_VALUE had their potential analytics use cases tested. The ability to backup and restore from ECS was successfully validated and potential use cases were demonstrated. The deployment process for the containerized setup was automated to streamline container deployment and the analytics-as-a-service approach for an on-premises environment was realized.