High Availability

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: Page 1 – how our servers are doing now, versus what the business wants In the past, we had three columns on this worksheet – HA, DR, and Oops Deletes. In this new version, we changed “Oops”…
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Synchronous Always On Availability Groups Is Not Zero Data Loss

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.…
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How to Configure Always On AG Backups with Ola Hallengren’s Scripts

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.…
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How to Set Up Standard Edition Always On Availability Groups in SQL Server 2016

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…
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“Breaking” News: Don’t Install SQL Server 2014 SP1

Yesterday, Microsoft announced availability of Service Pack 1, saying: As part of our continued commitment to software excellence for our customers, this upgrade is available to all customers with existing SQL Server 2014 deployments via the download links below. Yeah, about that commitment to software excellence. This morning, the download is gone: Notice: The SQL SSIS…
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