Infrastructure at your Service
Have you ever faced to timeout issues with SQL Server availability groups? If you take a look at the timeout parameters for an availability group, you will find a plenty of configuration settings. Indeed, you have timeout parameters for the availability group itself, for the replicas and for cluster itself as well. Well …a lot of parameters in order to deal with timeout issues. In fact, some of them can be very helpful regarding the…
This blog post will probably not concern customers where either password policy change rules are not defined for service accounts or Kerberos authentication is not used. But I’m sure that the number of these customers has decreased over at least the last decade. By the way, this is what I can notice at different customer places. But before beginning with group managed services let’s introduce managed services … Why using managed services (MSAs) against traditional…
During the last SQL Saturday in Paris, I had the opportunity to co-present the new SQL Server 2016 features and one of my topic concerned the availability group’s enhancements. I mentioned the replication throughput improvement but without giving more details and this is the idea of this blog post. First of all, let’s remind that the network throughput is part of the synchronous replication process and it is directly tied to the application transaction performance….
Are you aware about the new features of the next Windows version? Currently we’re in TP3 and during my investigation, I was very happy to see the new features for Windows clustering (cf. this blog post from Microsoft). By reading this article we can see: Workgroup Clusters: Clusters with nodes which are member servers / workgroup (not domain joined) If you remember, Microsoft had introduced Active Directory-Detached Cluster feature with Windows 2012 but the dependency…
A couple of weeks ago, I was involved in a discussion on the French forum developpez.com about SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups, index strategies and the impact on the readable secondary replicas. During this discussion, one of the forum member stated that rebuilding an index online had less impact than rebuilding an index offline on a readable secondary replica but I disagree with this affirmative. Is it really true? Let’s verify in this blog…
Often, when I’m in charge to implement an SQL Server AlwaysOn infrastructure with availability groups, customers ask me if it exists some best practices and recommendations about the maximum number of databases in an availability group planning. In fact, we have to keep in mind the relation between databases and the SQL Server worker pool in this architecture. Remember that the SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability group feature is an extension of the SQL Server…
This blog post is focused on the new supportability of clustered columnstore index on the high- availability read-only replicas. Others studies are available here: New database issue level detection for automatic failover Potential features in standard edition Automatic failover enhancements New load balancing features with read-only replicas After reading some improvements from the columnstore index feature side, I was very surprised to see the following section: Clustered columnstore indexes are now supported on AlwaysOn…
Let’s continue with this third post about SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups. Others studies are available here: New database issue level detection for automatic failover Potential features in standard edition Automatic failover enhancements This time I’ll talk about read-only secondaries and the new load-balancing support that will be introduced by SQL Server 2016. First of all, SQL Server 2014 improved the read-only secondary availability by solving the issue related to secondary accessibility when…
Let’s continue with this study of the new availability group enhancements. Others studies are available here: New database issue level detection for automatic failover Potential features in standard edition This time we’ll talk about the possibility to enrol a third replica for automatic failover. It implies of course to configure synchronous replication between the 2 pairs of replicas and this is at the cost of degrading the overall performance. But it seems that in this…
In my first blog about availability groups with SQL Server 2016, I talked quickly about the new interesting option: DB_FAILOVER. In this blog post, I will continue by introducing the new potential support of availability groups in a standard edition (based on the last Microsoft Ignit news). Yes, this sounds a great news because it will increase the scope of possible customers but bear in mind that it concerns potentially the standard edition (not in…
