As you probably know Microsoft announced an official name for SQL Server vNext during the last Microsoft Data Amp event on April 19 2017. It becomes officially SQL Serve 2017. In my first blog post, I wrote about SQL Server on Linux and the introduction of availability groups features. At this moment the SQL Server release version was CTP 1.3. As…
On May 2nd, I will have the chance to speak during the next SQL Nexus event in Copenhagen (1 -3 may) about SQL Server 2016 and availability groups and if I have enough time, you will see what is coming with the SQL Server vNext. This is also a good opportunity to attend to other sessions held by well-known people…
A couple of days ago, Microsoft has rolled out the SQL Server vNext CTP 1.3 which includes very nice features and the one that interested me in the supportability of AlwaysOn availability groups on Linux. That is definitely a good news because we may benefit from new ways of architecting high-availability. There are a lot of new cool enhancements, which…
I was playing with my lab environment which includes Windows 2016 and SQL Server 2016 and I noticed an interesting scenario while testing cluster node failures. After simulating some network outage scenarios, I was not able to bring back my cluster node online immediately by using traditional way. A quick look at the cluster manager led me to notice something…
Have you already a plan to migrate your old SQL Server 2012 availability group infrastructure to windows 2016 and SQL Server 2016? In a previous post, I talked about distributed availability groups and cross-cluster migration scenarios but this time the game is not the same because we want to achieve an in-place upgrade of the existing AG infrastructure. This question…
During the last MVP summit, we had some interesting discussions about availability groups with the SQL Server team and I remember someone asked for managing scenarios like Oracle cascaded destinations and the good news is that SQL Server 2016 already addresses this kind of scenario with distributed availability groups. For example, let’s say you have to manage heavily reporting activity…
I would like to share with you an interesting issue you may face while using SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups and secondary read-only replicas. For those who use secondary read-only replicas as reporting servers, keep reading this blog post because it is about update statistics behavior on the secondary replicas and as you may know cardinality estimation accuracy is an…
How to migrate an environment that includes availability groups from one Windows Failover Cluster to another one? This scenario is definitely uncommon and requires a good preparation. How to achieve this task depends mainly of your context. Indeed, we may use a plenty of scenarios according to the architecture in-place as well as the customer constraints in terms of maximum…
In this blog let’s talk about SQL Server and availability groups in standard Edition. I had some customer questions about existing limitations and this is a good opportunity to review them on this blog post. First of all, let’s say that Microsoft has already documented the restrictions here and from my side, I already written a blog post on the…
As you certainly know, the SQL Server 2014 SP2 has been released by Microsoft with some interesting improvements that concern SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups feature. In fact, all of them are also included into SQL Server 2012 SP3 and SQL Server 2016 (update 24.09.2016: not yet released with SQL Server 2016). Among all fixes and improvements that concern AlwaysOn, I would…
As promised in my prior blog post, we’ll talk now about direct seeding feature and backups. We found an interesting LIMIT_CONCURRENT_BACKUPS value for current state of the hadr_automatic_seeding_state_transition event. As said last time, this value is meaningful by itself. So let’s try to perform a backup while the database is concerned by an active seeding session. In fact, my backup…
This blog post follows the previous one about new direct seeding feature shipped with SQL Server 2016. As a reminder, I had some doubts about using direct seeding with large databases because log stream is not compressed by default but I forgot the performance improvements described into the Microsoft BOL. I also remembered to talk about it a couple of months…
