SQL Server Always On Availability Groups help you build a more highly available database server by spanning your database across two or more SQL Server instances. When the primary goes down, the secondary can take over. You can also scale out reads to the secondary servers. Distributed Availability Groups take this a step further and…
Microsoft is starting to talk about the internals for Azure SQL DB Hyperscale, their competitor to Amazon Aurora. Aurora took the open source MySQL and PostgreSQL front ends and hooked them up to much more powerful cloud-first storage engines on the back end. Here's a quick primer on how Microsoft is doing something similar -…
Whenever a new product or feature comes out, I like keeping an eye on its support forums to understand the challenges users are facing.
I went through Azure SQL DB's Managed Instance feedback forum, and here are some of the interesting issues that have been raised:
Disclaimer: I love Azure SQL Managed Instances (MIs) so far. They're really cool, and I'm having a fun time playing with them. I'm about to describe a bug, and I'm sure this bug will be fixed soon, so it shouldn't stop you from previewing Managed Instances. This post is not "MIs are t3h suxxors" -…
I knew Brent and Erik wouldn't touch replication, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.
My good, old friend replication
I have a love-hate relationship with replication. Mostly hate due to latency and errors, but it does serve its purpose. Before Availability Groups came out, I used Transactional Replication to copy data from the production OLTP database to another server so that we could offload reports.
Normally when we write blog posts, we try to explain something or tell a story. If you're looking for a solid educational post, stop here, mark this one as read, and go on about your day.
This post is just a brain dump of unorganized notes from our experimenting with Azure SQL DB Managed Instances Preview. Buckle up.
Anything Brent Can Do
There's some things you can do with Managed Instances, and some ways you can look at data that you can't do elsewhere.
For instance, you have the ability to start an restore ASYNC -- that means if your session drops, the restore will continue headlessly in the background.
Six is having problems adjusting to his clone status
Some funny things happen when you create databases up in a Managed Instance.
For Instance (HEH!), you may expect this to yield some fruitful results, but it Manages (HAH!) to defy logic.
[crayon-6a918089bf55e442323481/]
But we get blank results! Mon Dieu!
When you talk to people from Microsoft
They're all "aw shucks" about Trace Flags.
"Don't really need'em!"
"Eh, haven't used one in years."
"Sometimes they're good for troubleshooting, but..."
You've built your first Managed Instance, and now you wanna play around with real live data. You're going to need a backup in the cloud to do it - SSMS doesn't have a drag-and-drop option.
Big picture, here's what we're going to do:
