[Video] SQL Server Always On Availability Groups 101
I got a few closely related Availability Groups questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and decided to do a half-hour introduction to AGs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faeOAugqxcs
Category: High Availability
Adding Managed Instances to SQL Server Distributed Availability Groups
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…
Production DBA
DBA Training Plan 21: Building a New SQL Server
I have a secret setup checklist.
Oh sure, our free First Responder Kit has a SQL Server setup checklist that walks you through a few things you need to do before you install, plus a few things to do immediately afterwards. That's good. It's actually pretty darned good.
20 Questions to Ask About Your Availability Group Design
Questions about the overall project:
What are your RPO and RTO goals?
Are there financial penalties if we miss the goals? (Like contracts, refunds to customers, etc)
Does this app have regularly scheduled maintenance windows, or is it 24/7?
What’s the ballpark size of the data today? In 3 years?
Production DBA
Have Availability Groups Gotten Easier Lately?
Easy Lover I don't blog a lot about AGs. If we're being honest (and I do try to be honest with you, dear reader), I just like performance tuning topics way more. When new features get announced for AGs, some of you may ooh and aah, but not me. I Make A Face I don't…
Production DBA
How to Test Disaster Recovery Before You Go Live
When I build a server, success means not touching the server again for 2-3 years. I already have enough crappy, unreliable servers that fall over when someone walks past. I only wanna build good, permanent stuff going forward.
So when I build disaster recovery for something, I want to test it 3 ways:
Production DBA
So You Want a Cheap Disaster Plan
There's a lot that goes into a Disaster Recovery plan. One of them is offsite backups. There are some businesses that don't have backups going offsite, let alone a Disaster Recovery plan.
This conversation has taken place more than I thought it would.
Production DBA
An Expensive Reason To Avoid AGs In Azure
Cash Rules
Most people, when they get through paying for Azure, and SQL Server Enterprise Licensing, are left with a hole in their wallet that could only be filled with something that says "Bugatti", and has a speedometer with an infinity sign at the end.
Production DBA
sp_AllNightLog: Poll Vaulting
Carry on
It turns out that the only thing harder than checking for new databases restored to a SQL Server, is checking a folder for a backup of a database that doesn't exist on another SQL Server.
Production DBA
Direct Seeding: I’ve Got A Wizard And You Don’t
A commenter commented
That the "New AG Wizard" in SSMS 2017 had surfaced the Direct Seeding mode for AGs.
I was pretty psyched about this because I think it's a great feature addition to AGs that can solve for a pretty big hump that people run into when they create databases regularly.
Production DBA
New White Paper: How to Build a SQL Server Disaster Recovery Plan with Google Compute Engine
You’re a systems administrator or database administrator who wants to protect your production SQL Server. However, you don’t have a separate data center or another colo site.
You’re looking for instructions on:
New White Paper: How to Build an Always On Availability Group in Google Compute Engine
You’re a database administrator, Windows admin, or developer. You want to build a Microsoft SQL Server environment that’s highly available, and you’ve chosen to use Always On Availability Groups.
In this white paper we built with Google, we’ll show you:
Production DBA
Always On Availability Groups Now Supported in Google Compute Engine
I'm excited to finally be able to talk about something Erik, Tara, and I have been working on for the last few months.
Here in the SQL Server community, when I mention cloud, you probably think of two companies: Microsoft and Amazon. We've been blogging about SQL in AWS for years, and Microsoft throws a ton of marketing money at the SQL Server community, talking about Azure at every possible conference and user group.
When Always On Isn’t: Handling Outages in Your Application
Today's brief Stack Overflow outage reminded me of something I've always wanted to blog about:
There's a gray bar across the top that says, "This site is currently in read-only mode; we'll return with full functionality soon."
News & Opinion
Availability Groups: More Planned Downtime for Less Unplanned Downtime
I often hear companies say, "We can never ever go down, so we'd like to implement Always On Availability Groups."
Let's say on January 1, 2016, you rolled out a new Availability Group on SQL Server 2014. It's the most current version available at the time, and you deploy Service Pack 1, Cumulative Update 4 (released 2015/12/22). You're fully current, and it's a stable engine from 2014 - how many more bugs can they find, right?
Production DBA
The Cost of Adding a Reporting Server
"We'd like to offload our reporting queries to a separate SQL Server."
The first costs are fairly obvious.
Hardware and storage - even if you're running it in a virtual machine, you need to account for the costs of say, 4 cores and 32GB RAM. Not only will you need storage for the databases, but you'll also need to decide whether this server gets backed up, and copied to a disaster recovery data center.
Asynchronous Database Mirroring vs. Asynchronous Availability Groups
When Database Mirroring came out in SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1, we quickly dropped Log Shipping as our Disaster Recovery solution. Log Shipping is a good feature, but I can failover with Asynchronous Database Mirroring faster than I can with Log Shipping.
When Always On Availability Groups (AG) came out in SQL Server 2012, we were excited to get rid of Transactional Replication, Failover Clustering and Database Mirroring. It solved our reporting needs (your mileage may vary), our High Availability needs and our Disaster Recovery needs.
Production DBA
How to Run DBCC CHECKDB on a Log Shipping Subscriber
At first glance, if you set up log shipping the way most folks do, it looks like you can't run CHECKDB on a subscriber:
On SQL Server Enterprise Edition, you can try working around it by creating a database snapshot - but that won't work either:
Production DBA
Updated High Availability and Disaster Recovery Planning Worksheet
One of the most popular things in our First Responder Kit is our HA/DR planning worksheet. Here's page one: In the past, we had three columns on this worksheet - HA, DR, and Oops Deletes. In this new version, we changed "Oops" Deletes to "Oops" Queries to make it clear that sometimes folks just update…
Production DBA
Availability Group Direct Seeding: Mind Your Backup Jobs
I'll get right to the point While you're Direct Seeding, you have to be careful with any other full or differential backup jobs running on the server. This is an artifact of the Direct Seeding process, but it's one you should be aware of up front. In the screencap below, courtesy of sp_whoisactive there's a…
