Many companies are investigating a move into cloud hosting. With the recent release of SQL Server 2012, these very same companies are also looking at a migration to SQL Server 2012 to take advantage of readable secondaries. Combining Amazon Web Services and SQL Server 2012 seems like a perfect match. Unfortunately, there are some gotchas,…
Professions go through phases. Some skills are highly valued for a while, then go out of fashion. Just like leg warmers and skinny jeans, some skills come back into style when you least expect it. Database Administrators Started Out in the Server Room In the early days, most database administrators started out by racking servers.…
With SQL Server 2012's new AlwaysOn Availability Groups, we have the ability to run queries, backups, and even DBCCs on database replicas. But should we? Paul Randal (Blog - @PaulRandal) covered this issue in today's SQLskills Insider newsletter, and he says: "It’s not checking the I/O subsystem of the log shipping primary database – only…
Connection strings - boring topic, right? Well, it turns out there's a few things that can save your behind.
Tip 1: Build your application with 3 connection strings.
If you want to scale, write your application from the start with 3 different connection strings:
Writes and real-time reads
Reads that can tolerate data older than 15 seconds (no writes allowed with this connection string)
Reads that can tolerate data several hours old (like reports, and no writes allowed with this string)
The cloud is robust and reliable. The cloud solves all of our scaling needs. The cloud makes my poop smell like roses. While all of these statements are theoretically true it takes some effort to make them true in reality, especially when a database is involved. Who Is Deploying SQL Server in EC2? A question…
Before we get started, we need to talk about something. I'm going to be using the C word - that's right, Clustering. Deep, calming breaths. Relax. We can do this, you and me. This isn't the old-school clustering with shared disks, heartbeat networks, and hardware compatibility lists. This is just another feature you're going to…
In part 1 of this post, I covered how SQL Server handles scaling up. We talked about how quickly it becomes expensive to add more CPU power, memory, and storage throughput to our database servers. Today, we're going to focus on a different way to scale. When most folks talk about scaling out SQL Server,…
SQL Server 2012 brings huge improvements for scaling out and high availability. To put these changes into perspective, let's take a trip down memory road first and look at the history of database mirroring. SQL Server 2005 first introduced mirroring, although it wasn't fully supported until a service pack. In many ways, mirroring beat the…
