Time flies, seasons are flying by and seemingly changing day by day. We have slippery slopes here, there, and everywhere. Every now and again Database professionals need a quick moment to get away from the fray. As luck would have it, it is now time for a fabulous party – to get away from all…
Category: High Availability
5 Tips for Friday: Availability Groups
It’s Friday again and time for another set of tips. It’s 5 Tips for Friday! This week I want to give you some best practices for managing and administering Availability Groups. Don’t skip past quorum: How always on your Always On* solution is often depends on how you have configured quorum. Quorum is often overlooked,…
Availability Groups & Reindexing
I’ve been working with AGs for the last year and have a couple of things as regards indexing that I thought would be good to share: Always sort in tempdb When you create, or rebuild an index you have the ability to have the index perform the sort of the data inside of tempdb. This…
Availability Group WSFC Failovers During VM Movement
If you experience a WSFC failover during a VMware vMotion / Hyper-V Live Migration with your virtualized SQL Servers when using Availability Groups, you might have server and/or networking hardware that takes a bit longer than usual to handle the network port failover. This can lead to short unexpected outages in your application during the…
Rolling Upgrades With Availability Groups – A Warning
One of the great options provided by Availability Groups, in SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition and newer, is the ability to perform rolling upgrades to new Service Packs or Cumulative Updates. The basic idea is that you apply the update to one of the AG secondary servers and then perform a failover of SQL to…
You Can’t Meet Your RPO/RTO With AlwaysOn
“That title may have caught your attention. AlwaysOn is the future of HA/DR for SQL Server, and has been since the release of SQL 2012. AlwaysOn is actually a marketing term which covers Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) and Availability Groups (AGs). Allan Hirt (@sqlha | blog) is a strong proponent of ensuring that people understand…
Automated Backup Tuning
Tuning your backups is a wonderful thing. You could easily reduce the time it takes to backup your databases by 50% of more just by changing a few settings, and yet so few people do it. I asked myself the question why and came up with two answers. People do not know how to tune…
Removing a Perfectly Good Cluster, Part Two
Yesterday I started a new project to downgrade our two new SQL Server 2008 R2 clusters down to SQL Server 2008 clusters. The uninstall went off without a hitch as we removed both nodes and then removed the support tools. I find it interesting that when we went to install the 2008 server, there was still tempDB…
Your “Five Nines” Means Nothing To Me
There’s a lot of talk on High Availability. I know I’m a huge fan of it, in particular clustering (but I know it’s not for all situations and the changes that SQL 2012 with AlwaysOn Groups may mean that traditional clustering is used less and less). There are of course other HA solutions out there…
SQL Clustering–Network Binding Order Warnings
In setting up my Windows 2008 R2/SQL 2008 R2 cluster this week I came across a warning in the Setup Support Rules stating that “The domain network is not the first bound network.” This didn’t make any sense to me as I had been very careful in setting the binding order in the network…