If you're using SQL Server 2012's hot new AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature, your databases will go offline when your network connection does - even if you're using asynchronous replication.
This is not a bug. This is working as designed - and it's important to understand the underlying concepts.
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…
The options for high availability can get confusing. I was lucky enough to begin working with SQL Server clusters early in my career, but many people have a hard time finding simple information on what a cluster does and the most common gotchas when planning a cluster. Today, I’ll tell you what clusters are, what they’re…
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…
