A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Edwin Sarmiento digs into a failure:
Since we have experienced a number of unplanned outages and failovers on our SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, we want to know the root cause to prevent them from happening in the future. How do we identify the root causes of unplanned Availability Group outages and failovers?
Read on to learn how to use the AGDiag tool to answer this question.
Comments closedKendra Little explains a problem:
If you use readable secondaries in Availability Groups or Read-Scale out instances in Azure SQL Managed Instance, you may have queries fail repeatedly if there is a glitch and statistics are not successfully “refreshed” on the secondary replica. Those queries may keep failing until you manually intervene.
This has been the case for a few years, and it’s unclear if Microsoft will fix this. There is a well established support deflection article which documents the issue and provides ‘workarounds’.
Read on for Kendra’s thoughts. I haven’t run into this before, myself, but I also don’t tend to make very heavy use of readable secondaries.
Comments closedIn this video, we will build out two availability groups for SQL Server on Linux.
This one’s a pretty lengthy video, as I describe some of the mechanisms around availability groups and we build two AGs across three instances from scratch in SQL Server on Linux.
Comments closedSean Gallardy talks about an error:
Contained Availability Groups are the most recent update to the Availability Groups feature, and a great update at that! They are completely new in SQL Server 2022, and like any new feature (or even mature ones) there will be some bugs. Enter in some Access Violations (AVs) that may occur when creating a new contained availability group.
Read on for an example of the error and what you can do until Microsoft fixes it.
Comments closedSean Gallardy troubleshoots a problem:
Read Scale Availability Groups can be pretty useful in the right places and for the right things and were a latest feature update for AGs until Contained AGs came along in 2022. Read Scale AGs don’t integrate with clustering of any type and they behave somewhat as mirroring used to where there is no real coordination of resources and it is up to the administrators to make the proper judgement calls or automate whatever possible scenarios they deem important.
Read on to see what this error means and why it’s less of a problem than it first appears.
Comments closedSean Gallardy has a video for us:
The first video olved stery! In this one we look at an FCI node that will not come online after patching.
Click through for that video, which is a great learning instrument for in-depth analysis of a SQL Server problem.
Comments closedAmit Khandelwal packs a lot into a post:
It’s time for a new blog on how Ansible can simplify SQL Server deployment, configuration, and availability. If you’ve read my previous blogs on Ansible for SQL Server installation and configuration, and the pacemaker-based Always On availability group, you know how powerful Ansible can be. Now, let’s talk about HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX), a high availability/disaster recovery solution that provides business continuity for critical applications like SQL Server.
Deploying SQL Server Always On availability groups on HPE SGLX is a fully supported solution for production workloads.
Today, let’s look at how you can configure Always On availability group based on HPE SGLX via Ansible. We have collaborated with our friends in HPE to enable the Ansible based deployment for HPE SGLX with SQL Server. This feature is now available for HPE SGLX 15.10. For this demonstration, you can download the evaluation bits from the ‘My HPE Software Center‘. The Ansible bits with the scripts are available on GitHub:
Read on for instructions and what you need to make it all work.
Comments closedEtienne Lopes begins a new series:
“As part of High Availability architecture, each single database, elastic pool database, and managed instance in the Premium and Business Critical service tier is automatically provisioned with a primary read-write replica and one or more secondary read-only replicas.”
Read on to see how you can add support for read-only, scale-out replicas to an existing Azure SQL Database. Just know how much that bill is going to be.
Comments closedI don’t often find many people using FileStream in their databases (which isn’t a bad or good thing, in my opinion, just a statement of fact). Some technologies in SQL Server use it behind the scene, such as FileTable or Hekaton, and there isn’t really any getting around it in those cases. However, I was brought an interesting issue by a friend on Database Administrators Stack Exchange, Hannah Vernon (w), when it came to a database that was in a Distributed Availability Group in 2019 and had no issues, but after upgrading to SQL Server 2022, started having a major problem.
Read on for Sean’s analysis of the problem and solution.
Comments closedGreg Dodd explains three terms:
A quick description of 3 metrics that SQL tracks in Availability Groups. These metrics are important when evaluating the health of your Availability Group, and knowing what sort of data loss you might face in a failover. Remember, just because you told SQL to make your AAG Synchronous, doesn’t mean you won’t have data loss.
Click through for the definitions.
Comments closed