Availability Groups are all the rage right now, especially since they’re included with SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition. Our Availability Groups blog post category is one of the most popular on the site, and in my 4-day Senior DBA class, people have always been asking for more in-depth coverage of clustering and AGs. Let’s get together for a…
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. It used to…
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: How to build your first Availability Group in Google Compute Engine How to test your…
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…
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.” That’s not a hidden feature of Always On Availability Groups. Rather, it’s a hidden feature of really dedicated developers…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
From the Mailbag In another post I did on Direct Seeding, reader Bryan Aubuchon asked if it plays nicely with TDE. I’ll be honest with you, TDE is one of the last things I test interoperability with. It’s annoying that it breaks Instant File Initialization, and mucks up backup compression. But I totally get the…
As of this writing, this is all undocumented I’m super interested in this feature, so that won’t deter me too much. There have been a number of questions since Availability Groups became a thing about how to automate adding new databases. All of the solutions were kind of awkward scripts to backup, restore, join, blah…
This post covers two scenarios You either created a database, and the sync failed for some reason, or a database stopped syncing. Our setup focuses on one where sync breaks immediately, because whatever it’s my blog post. In order to do that, I set up a script to create a bunch of databases, hoping that…
One of my least favorite things about Availability Groups Well, really, this goes for Mirroring and Log Shipping, too. Don’t think you’re special just because you don’t have a half dozen patches and bug fixes per CU. Hah. Showed you! Where was I? Oh yeah. I really didn’t like the backup and restore part. You…
How hard is it for a systems administrator who’s used to running SQL Server on Windows Clusters to tackle Availability Groups? Our example system administrator knows a bit of TSQL and their way around Management Studio, but is pretty new to performance tuning. Well, it might be harder than you think. First, let’s look at…
One of your SQL Servers is going to fail. When one of your AG members goes down, what happens next is just like opening a new SSMS window and typing BEGIN TRAN. From this moment forwards, the transaction log starts growing. And growing. And growing. SQL Server is waiting for that failed replica to come back…
In theory, when you configure AlwaysOn Availability Groups with synchronous replication between multiple replicas, you won’t lose data. When any transaction is committed, it’s saved across multiple replicas. That’s the way it works, right? I mean, except when you restart your synchronous replicas, or patch them, or they just stop working for any number of reasons….
I saw a DBA.StackExchange.com question and had to laugh out loud: “Is there a cool way of performing CU updates for SQL Server on hundreds of machines?” No, and it has nothing to do with technology. Which servers are mission-critical 24/7 and can’t go down? Which servers can only be taken down in specific time windows?…
Growing up as a young boy, my elementary teachers always warned me about the perils of putting stuff in master. But what’s the real deal? Why is this such a bad idea? System databases are often located on space-limited drives. The default installation parameters for SQL Server throw master, model, and msdb all on the…
With SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you can offload backups to a replica rather than running them on the primary. Here’s how to do it: 1. Install Ola Hallengren’s utility scripts on all of the replicas. During the install, it creates a laundry list of SQL Agent jobs, but doesn’t set up schedules for any of them….
SQL Server 2016 adds Availability Groups in Standard Edition. While the licensing details can obviously change right up to release date, here’s what was announced at the Ignite conference: Limited to two nodes only (a primary and a secondary) Like mirroring, you can’t read from the secondary, nor take backups of it But like database…
