In Recovery... | Replication

I just heard today that the first whitepaper I've written for Microsoft has been published!

The abstract is:

SQL Server Replication: Providing High-Availability using Database Mirroring

This white paper describes how to use database mirroring to increase the availability of the replication stream in a transactional environment. It covers setting up replication in a mirrored environment, the effect of mirroring partnership state changes, and the effect of mirroring failovers on replication. In addition, it describes how to use LSN-based initialization to recover from the failover of a mirrored subscriber database.

Although brief overviews are given of both replication and database mirroring, it is easier to understand this white paper if the reader has some experience with one or both of these technologies, and has at least a rudimentary knowledge of database concepts such as transactions.

You can download it from http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/ReplicationAndDBM.docx and I'll put a link in our whitepapers page.

Enjoy!

Categories:
Database Mirroring | High Availability | Replication | SQL Server 2008 | Whitepapers

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the three tracks of the SQL Server 2008 JumpStart course that SQLskills.com taught internally for Microsoft and some MVPs - see here for details. Well, the content is now available to download! Note that this was based on CTP-5 (November 2007 CTP) and there have been *lots* of behavioral changes since then (with more planned for CTP-6 Refresh and RTM), but if you want a high-level overview of a bunch of the features (albeit in bullet-point summaries on slides) then this is a good place to start.

For me, what's *REALLY* cool is that the site also has a downloadable VPC plus lab manuals for all of the AlwaysOn High-Availability hands-on labs that SQLskills.com wrote. We originally wrote these labs for SQL Server 2005 and I updated them all for CTP-5. The VPC has a long lab on each of the following:

Database Snapshots
Data Recovery and Preventative Techniques
Instant Initialization
Peer-to-Peer Replication (including the new Topology Wizard I blogged about here)
Table and Index Partitioning
Snapshot Isolation
Online Operations
Database Mirroring (including a demo I wrote of Automatic Page Repair, described here)
Service Oriented Database Architecture

There is some great depth in each of these - Kimberly blogged more info about the exercises in each lab here. There's also another VPC image with some higher-level labs on a variety of 2008 features and written by a number of different people- including some labs on Policy-Based Management and Performance Data Collection that Kimberly wrote.

So - where can you get these from? Go to http://sqlserver2008jumpstart.microsofttraining.com/ and hit the Download link on the right-hand side. Register and then you can get to the materials. The AlwaysOn VPC image is Collection 2 at the bottom of the page, and you'll see all the slide decks as you scroll down the page.

Enjoy!

Wow - almost 10 days without a blog post - that must be a record for me! :-) Never fear - I'll be posting more over the next couple of weeks. Kimberly flew off to India yesterday to teach some Microsoft classes and unfortunately I couldn't join her this time as I'm teaching 3 classes myself:

an internal Microsoft class on Designing for High Availability
another internal Microsoft class on SQL Server 2008 for DBAs (similar to the JumpStart class I posted about here)
3 days of content for the new Microsoft Certified Architect: Database qualification - see the Microsoft Learning site here for details

Anyway - the subject of this post is to let you know that last week, Kimberly and I did two interviews for TechNet Radio on SQL Server 2008 technologies. Part 1 has just been released where we discuss security and availability features. You can get to it by going to the March 4th 2008 show here. Tune in and find out how I lull myself to sleep when Kimberly's out of town...

Enjoy!

Phew - last week Kimberly and I spent 3 days teaching the ins-and-outs of SQL Server 2008 for DBAs/IT-Pros to about 130 Microsoft SQL Server experts and MVPs (like Kalen Delaney, Adam Machanic and Ron Talmage). This was the (95% complete) Beta delivery of a course we've been developing for the last six months for Microsoft that they'll use to train their SQL experts around the world on the new release. It's been very interesting watching the features develop through the CTPs (especially since I left the fold last August) - and making demos work on pre-release builds of the CTPs.

Teaching the course was a *blast* - the thing I love about teaching a really geeky crowd is the plethora of great questions and opportunities for going deep with explanations. Our team actually wrote and delivered the concurrently presented Developer and BI tracks as well. As you can see from the list below (and this is just the features a DBA needs to use/know about), SQL Server 2008 isn't a dot release of Yukon at all, as some people have suggested. Over the three days we covered:

Database Mirroring (D)
Backup Compression
Peer-to-Peer Replication (D)
Transparent Data Encryption (D)
Extensible (Off-Box) Key Management
All Actions Audited (D)
Policy-Based Management
Resource Governor (D)
Extended Events (D)
Spatial Indexes
Integrated Full-Text Search
Sparse Columns (D)
Filtered Indexes
Change Tracking
Change Data Capture (D)
FILESTREAM (D)
Performance Data Collection
Query Optimizer Enhancements
Data Compression (D)
Service Broker
Partition-Level Lock Escalation (D)

The features marked with a (D) are ones I demo'd during the course (Kimberly demo'd a bunch of the others - especially the tools features). Some of the demos were challenging to make work in time as we only got a pre-CTP6 build mid-January just before we headed off to China.

So why am I posting this? Well, a bunch of these features are in CTP-6, which should be just around the corner, and I have some easy-to-understand demos of them that I'll be posting here over the next month or so. Also, if this course sounds interesting, Kimberly and I will be teaching it in various configurations over the next year - starting with SQL Connections in April, a soon-to-be-announced class in Iceland in March, and the ITPro portion of TechEd in June.

Watch this space starting next week (today's the last day of six straight weeks of teaching for us so this weekend's a break :-))

SQLskills.com has released its first ever utility! :-)

After several years of being asked to make available the Dual Database Monitor application (that's present inside the popular AlwaysOn Hands-On Labs we give out), I've spent a bunch of time making it configurable, work outside the VPC environment, and available in an easy kit form for people to use. It comes with easy-to-follow instructions and example SQL scripts to get you going. It supports SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.

This is an invaluable tool to use when setting up a Database Mirroring partnership to check that mirroring is working ok, without having to hack up your own application to do it. It can also be used to monitor two nodes of a peer-to-peer replication topology (or more using multiple instances of the monitor). It comes in two versions - single-user or unlimited use within a single company.

Check out the DDM webpage here for more details and ordering info.

Categories:
Database Mirroring | Products | Replication

While we were in Barcelona we sat down with Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes from RunAs Radio to record a 1/2 hour interview on SQL Server 2008. We touch on a ton of different features (look at the number of Categories I've tagged this with!) and have a bunch of laughs along the way - check it out here.

PS There's been a ton of interest in the slide deck idea I had so we'll be going ahead with that. Look for an announcement sometime in the first few months of next year about how to get them. Thanks to everyone that replied!

One of the cool features added in SQL Server 2005 for scaling-out a workload was peer-to-peer replication. The major drawback was that to change an existing peer-to-peer topology, the entire topology had to be quiesced. In SQL Servr 2008, the Configure Peer-To-Peer Topology Wizard in Management Studio has undergone a major face-lift and a peer-to-peer topology can be altered ONLINE - very cool!

To get to the wizard, you still need to go through the clunkiness of enabling peer-to-peer subscriptions in the Subscription Options pane of the Publication Properties of a new publication (by right-clicking the publication under the Replication->Local Publications folder in Object Explorer):

Once that's set to True, you can right-click the publication and you'll see a Configure Peer-To-Peer Topology option which will bring up the new wizard. Here's what you'll see with only a single node configured - I've hovered the mouse over the node to get the tool-tip to show up:

By right-clicking anywhere on the design surface you get a menu, from which you can select to Add a New Peer Node. Of course the node you select has to already have been setup for replication otherwise you'll get an error. As long as replication is already setup, you'll get the Add a New Peer Node wizard:

You need to set the Peer Originator ID to a number that isn't already being used by another node in the topology - it would be nice if the wizard would default to an ID it knows isn't being used instead of 1. You then decide whether to have peer-to-peer connections with all the other nodes in the topology automatically setup. If you don't check that option, the node will appear on the topology viewer, but with no connections, like below (again I've brought up the tool-tip so you can see it's a different node than the first one - in this case a different instance inside a VPC):

If you don't check the option, you can create connections manually by simply right-clicking either node and selecting Add a New Peer Connection. You'll see a rubber-banding arrow that you pull to the node you want to connect to. I tested the automatic method of creating the connections and it works nicely too. Here's a three node topology in the viewer:

The rest of the wizard is as before - setting the Log Reader Agent and Distributor Agent security settings and how to initialize the new peer. At any point you can go back into the wizard and add or remove connections or peers. I'm pretty impressed!

Categories:
Replication | SQL Server 2008 | Tools

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