Category: Availability Groups

Ryan Adams explains how to create a Read-Scale Availability Group:

A Read-Scale Availability Group is a Clusterless Availability Group.  It’s sole purpose and design is to scale out a read workload.  More importantly is what it is not.  It is NOT a High Availability or Disaster Recovery solution.  Since this design has no cluster under it, you lose things like automatic failover and database level health detection.  For example, You have reports that run for customers that are in your DMZ that is fire-walled off from your internal network.  Opening up ports for Active Directory so that you can have a cluster means opening a ton of ephemeral ports and ports with high attack vectors.  Remember the Slammer worm?  This solution removes those dependencies.

Click through for the setup scripts as well as a video Ryan created of him putting it all together.  As long as you recognize the trade-offs involved, this can be a nice solution to certain problems.

Frank Gill explains one method of building out data in an Availability Group, automatic seeding:

Microsoft released Availability Groups (AG) as a feature in SQL Server 2012. Prior to SQL Server 2016, there were two methods of adding a database to a new AG replica.

1. You could provide the Add Database to Availability Group wizard a file share accessible by the primary and secondary replicas.  SQL Server would run FULL and LOG backups of each database to the share and use them to restore the database(s) to each replica.
2. You could manually run a FULL and LOG backup of each database, copy the backup files to each replica, and restore the databases WITH NORECOVERY.

With SQL Server 2016. Microsoft has provided a third option, Automatic Seeding.  With Automatic Seeding, you specify the databases and the replicas and SQL Server will begin transferring data to each replica.  The duration of the seeding process depends on the size of the database and the network bandwidth available between primary and secondary replica.

Automatic seeding isn’t perfect, but it’s quite useful.

Dong Cao explains the two different models for transaction log redo when using availability groups:

When availability group was initially released with SQL Server 2012, the transaction log redo was handled by a single redo thread for each database in an AG secondary replica. This redo model is also called as serial redo. In SQL Server 2016, the redo model was enhanced with multiple parallel redo worker threads per database to share the redo workload. In addition, each database has a new helper worker thread for handling the dirty page disk flush IO. This new redo model is called parallel redo.

With the new parallel redo model that is the default setting since SQL Server 2016, workloads with highly concurrent small transactions are expected to achieve better redo performance. When the transaction redo operation is CPU intensive, such as when data encryption and/or data compression are enabled, parallel redo has even higher redo throughput (Redone Bytes/sec) compared to serial redo. Moreover, indirect checkpoint allows parallel redo to offload more disk IO (and IO waits for slow disk) to its helper worker thread and frees main redo thread to enumerate more received log records in secondary replica. It further speeds up the redo performance.

Read on to learn more about these two models, including positives and negatives for each and how to switch from one to the other.

Allan Hirt points out two improvements to Availability Groups in the latest SQL Server 2016 and 2017 patches:

First and foremost, SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 2 was just released today. There are two major improvements in it for AGs:

1. SQL Server 2016 now has full Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) support. SQL Server 2016 had partial support for DTC with one of the two scenarios (cross instance/cross platform), but not intra-instance DBs. SQL Server 2017 had both, and now that was backported so SQL Server 2016 supports all DTC scenarios with AGs. This is great news.

Click through for the other major improvement.  This is in addition to yesterday’s notice regarding the distribution database.

Simon Su walks us through a customer scenario where transactions per second would drop several orders of magnitude for a second, and then jump back up to normal:

The “Transaction Delay” value is an accumulation of the delay of all the current transaction delay in millisecond. You can see that the “Transaction Delay” counter has the same spikes as the sudden drop of the “Transactions Created/Sec”. Its spikes indicate that at those time points the AG transactions have time delay during commits.  This gives us a very good start point. We can focus on the transaction delay in our AG performance troubleshooting.

So who causes the transaction delay? Is it primary replica, secondary replica, or other factors like network traffic?

As a must go-through step for performance troubleshooting we captured performance monitor logs to check how the performance behaved on both replicas.  We want to find out whether there is any performance bottleneck existing in primary or secondary. For example, whether CPU usage is high when transaction delay spike happens, whether disk queue length is long, disk latency is large, etc.  We expect to find something that has the same spike trend as the “Transaction Created/sec” or “Transaction Delay”. Unfortunately, we do not anything interesting. CPU usage is as low 30%, Disk speed is quite fast. No disk queue length at all. We then checked AG related counters, like the log send queue and the recovery queue as the above two links mentioned but again we do not find anything helpful.

At the endpoint, there’s a reminder that you should keep up to date on patching systems.

David Fowler explains what could cause a read-only secondary replica in an Availability Group to have its tempdb fill up:

When I have an issue with tempdb filling up the first thing that I usually do is try to figure out exactly what the space has been allocated to.

You can quickly figure out what process has the most space allocated by using a quick query against dm_db_session_space_usage.

SELECT session_id, database_id, user_objects_alloc_page_count + internal_objects_dealloc_page_count AS TotalAllocatedPages
FROM sys.dm_db_session_space_usage
ORDER BY TotalAllocatedPages DESC

But what if you can see that there aren’t any pages allocated to sessions?  What could be taking up all the space?  Well let’s have a little look and see exactly where those pages are allocated.

Click through to see David’s results and explanation.

Cody Konior stress tests Availability Group round-robin routing:

I’ve been hearing about round-robin read-only routing ever since SQL 2016 came out but whenever I tried to test if it’s working it never seemed to be. But now I know exactly how it works and there’s a few loopholes where it may not trigger, and they’re not the documented ones you’re thinking of.

To test the limits of it you’re going to need:

• PowerShell 5.1
• Pester 4 (Install-Module Pester -Force)
• DbData (Install-Module DbData -Force)

I’ll explain any of the Pester and DbData bits along the way so don’t worry. They’re minor framework stuff.

There’s some good stuff here around connection pooling, so check it out.