It is a common misconception that you need real production data, or production like data, to effectively tune queries in SQL Server. I am going to explain how you can compile the same execution plans as what your production environment would compile, so that you can tune them in a non-production environment, gaining these benefits.
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Availability groups can no longer be considered new. The feature was released in SQL Server 2012 but I often notice that SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) are much better understood. For a very long time, when people thought about SQL Server they thought about the entire instance as a unit. Microsoft has been implementing new features and services which begin to segment the concept of an instance from the concept of a database.
Read more »With all of the high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) features, the database administrator must understand how much data loss and downtime is possible under the worst case scenarios. Data loss affects your ability to meet recovery point objectives (RPO) and downtime affects your recovery time objectives (RTO). When using Availability Groups (AGs), your RTO and RPO rely upon the replication of transaction log records between at least two replicas to be extremely fast. The worse the performance, the more potential data loss will occur and the longer it can take for a failed over database to come back online.
Read more »Every organization has at least one of those guys. You are the guy if you have been with the company long enough that you are very familiar with all of the servers in multiple environments. You can easily translate the SharePoint server into its server name, CL-DB-001-B\SP_2010 and you know all of the DNS aliases pointing to that server as well. Your super power also makes you a magnet for everyone in IT to come and ask you where this database is and what is on that server.
Read more »When I configured my first Always-On Availability Group, I setup a Windows Cluster and started with SQL Server Management Studio’s New Availability Group Wizard, scripting out the steps along the way. This entire process took only a matter of minutes. The minimum required steps for configuring the cluster and getting a database into an Availability Group (AG) are very few. This process, however, is deceptively simple. What some don’t realize is that the majority of work required for setting up an AG needs to occur in the planning phase, before a server is even requisitioned. Let us examine the questions that you should ask before implementing an AG.
Read more »Now that Karla’s restore process is mature, it is time to pre-stage the means of reporting on these events. Two major actions have been taken for each database tested. First a restore operation occurred. The restore operation validates that the backup file is well formed and that there is nothing wrong with the data which would cause a failure. Next CheckTables was executed to thoroughly inspect for data corruption and any consistency errors. Each of these two actions will have their own methods of providing evidence of successful completion. Recall the requirements set by Karla, in part 1 of this series, for the reporting piece. Read more »
Karla is a production database administrator and she has a lot in common with you. Being responsible for database backups and recovery, she has implemented a well-structured automated backup system. Maybe she’s using Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Solution, custom T-SQL stored procedures, or a set of PowerShell scripts. She has heard the saying, “a DBA only needs one thing, either a backup or a resume, but never both,” and is confident that she won’t be dusting off the resume any time soon. Read more »
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