directseeding

Direct Seeding: I’ve Got A Wizard And You Don’t

Last Updated May 26, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, High Availability

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…

Availability Group Direct Seeding: Mind Your Backup Jobs

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Erik Darling

Always On Availability Groups, Backup and Recovery, SQL Server

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…

Availability Group Direct Seeding: TDE’s Frenemy

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Erik Darling

Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server

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…

Availability Group Direct Seeding: Extended Events and DMVs

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Erik Darling

Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server

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…

Availability Group Direct Seeding: How to fix a database that won’t sync

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Erik Darling

Always On Availability Groups

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…