SQL Server Availability Groups have been around for a while. A lot of organizations are still in the process of implementing them as they upgrade their database platforms to the latest version of SQL Server. As more and more organizations move away from older versions and into the newer ones, Availability Groups will become much […]
One of the most common question I get asked is, “Can I use Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for SQL Server Reporting Services?” The primary intent behind this question is high availability. And when high availability is a requirement for a Microsoft product, the first thing that comes to mind is a WSFC. SQL Server Reporting Services […]
In a previous blog post, I talked about the new SQL Server 2016 Availability Groups Load Balancing of Read-Only Replicas feature (I know that’s a mouthful but it’s how I understand the concept.) I explained how the precedence rules in defining how the read-only workload is balanced across multiple readable secondary replicas using nested parenthesis. […]
One of the most annoying practice that I’ve learned decades ago when I was a data center engineer is change management. Change management is a formal process that defines a set of procedures and steps to manage all changes, updates, or modifications to hardware and software (systems) across an organization. My personal definition of […]
Christmas and New Year have just gone by. You may have stories about how you celebrated the holidays – the sumptuous meals shared with all of the family members, the conversations around the fireplace, opening gifts on Christmas eve, etc. Ours is a bit different than usual. Because, on the day before Christmas, we were on […]
In a previous blog post, I talked about the possibility of having unexpected SQL Server database backups that can affect your disaster recovery strategy. You certainly don’t want to be caught off-guard when that happens. I’ve provided a very simple use case of how it can happen – and it did happen to me a […]
About four years ago, I did my very first webcast on the Availability Groups feature in SQL Server 2012. The premise of the presentation was how we can provide high availability features to existing SQL Server workloads without making changes to the underlying storage. For my demo, I used an existing database mirroring configuration for high […]
Last week, I wrote about a database corruption case that I had the opportunity to work on. I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with the database developer to understand what the columns are for, what their values represent and the corresponding relationships with other tables. In the process of trying to recover as […]
A recent conversation that we had around the dinner table revolved around fire safety hazards. The last week of November happened to be the National Home Fire Safety Week in Canada and promotes fire safety in homes and residential areas. Home insurance companies would recommend having a fire extinguisher at home placed in the kitchen or […]
There are only two ways that can truncate your SQL Server log files – a checkpoint process when the database is in simple (or pseudo-simple) recovery model or a log backup when the database is in full or bulk-logged recovery models. In order for log truncation to occur, the virtual log files (VLFs) need to […]
