Yesterday on Twitter a few people expressed disgust at a conference slide listing transactional replication as a high-availability (HA) technology. I took exception to that and argued. I think the discussion merits a blog post so here it is. This point of view is controversial and I'm expecting some dissenting comments – bring them on! I teach [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
In defense of transactional replication as an HA technology
Posted on: November 3, 2010 10:28 am
Whitepaper on high-availability architectures published
Posted on: June 4, 2010 11:00 am
The 20-page whitepaper I wrote this Spring for the SQL team has just been published. This whitepaper is titled Proven SQL Server Architectures for High Availability and Disaster Recovery and ties in with the longer whitepaper I wrote last year on High Availability with SQL Server 2008 (see here). This new whitepaper describes the five [...]
What can cause log reads and other transaction log questions
Posted on: December 9, 2009 4:14 pm
Earlier today there was a question on SQL Server Central where someone wanted to know what could be causing so many reads on their transaction log. I was asked to chime in by fellow MVP Jonathan Kehayias (who also sent me some questions that I've answered in this post – thanks Jon!), so I did, with [...]
SQL Server 2008 High Availability whitepaper published on MSDN
Posted on: September 28, 2009 12:42 pm
The 35-page whitepaper on high availability I wrote for the SQL team over the summer has been published on MSDN. It's a 2-300 level whitepaper that describes the various high-availability technologies in SQL Server 2008 and how they can be used to mitigate disasters. It's chock-full of links to other whitepapers, technical articles and Books [...]
Adding geo-redundancy to failover clustering
Posted on: August 26, 2009 12:07 pm
A few weeks ago I kicked off a survey on how you add geo-redundancy to a failover cluster (see here for the survey). The results as of 8/26/09 are as follows: So why is this interesting? Well, many people will suggest failover clustering as the best way to provide high-availability for a database (or [...]
SQL Server2008: New whitepaper on combining transactional replication and database mirroring
Posted on: September 2, 2008 8:05 pm
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 [...]
Available for download: Our High-Availability hands-on labs and SQL Server 2008 JumpStart materials
Posted on: March 12, 2008 5:23 pm
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* [...]
TechNet Radio interview with Paul and Kimberly on SQL Server 2008 – Part 1
Posted on: March 5, 2008 2:31 am
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 [...]
SQL Server 2008 JumpStart
Posted on: February 15, 2008 12:38 am
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 [...]
Paul and Kimberly interview on RunAs Radio – What’s New in SQL Server 2008?
Posted on: December 12, 2007 6:07 pm
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 – [...]
SQL Server 2008: Configuring Peer-to-Peer Replication
Posted on: December 7, 2007 12:31 am
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 [...]
