New Article on SQLPerformance.com: "Avoid HA/DR Solution Self-Delusion"

My sixth guest blog post was published today on SQLPerformance.com: Avoid HA/DR Solution Self-Delusion This article gives a few examples of how we can delude ourselves into thinking that a solution is fully meeting our high availability and disaster recovery requirements.

Documenting Availability Group PBM Conditions

There doesn’t seem to be much documentation out on the web regarding the AlwaysOn Availability Group policies and associated conditions that come with SQL Server 2012, so I thought I would aggregate / organize some of the condition logic here for reference-sake…  Also – looking at conditions in SSMS, you’ll see that for some conditions […]

SQLPerformance.com “Configuring a Dedicated Network for Availability Group Communication”

My first guest blog post published today on SQLPerformance.com: Configuring a Dedicated Network for Availability Group Communication The subject was originally motivated by a question I received at a recent training event, regarding how one would go about using a dedicated network for the endpoints used in availability group communication. Cheers!

Planning to use Availability Groups? Keep this page bookmarked…

If you’re planning on using Availability Groups in a production environment, I highly recommend you review the following Books Online topic: Prerequisites, Restrictions, and Recommendations for AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server) There are other topics that should be reviewed too, of course, but this particular landing page is being kept up-to-date with various recommended hotfixes,  […]

AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups

The SQL CAT team identified three common patterns for customers who were actively testing and deploying SQL Server 2012 high availability and disaster recovery solutions.  One pattern is to use a multi-site Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) for local high availability and disaster recovery.  A second pattern is to use AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AG) for local […]

AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using AlwaysOn Availability Groups

The new “AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using AlwaysOn Availability Groups” white paper was just published by Microsoft over the weekend. I co-authored this white paper with Sanjay Mishra, Senior Program Manager in the Microsoft SQL Customer Advisory Team. This paper covers one of the three common customer […]

A first look at SQL Server 2012 Availability Group Wait Statistics

I wrote an article for Simple-Talk that was published last Monday: A first look at SQL Server 2012 Availability Group Wait Statistics AlwaysOn Availability Groups have their own host of associated wait types, so I thought I would investigate the various wait stats that accumulate based on different scenarios.  I see this topic evolving over […]

Answering Questions with the AlwaysOn Dashboard

The word “dashboard” immediately puts me into a state of suspicion. This is probably because I’ve been a part of the corporate world for 18 years now and, fair or not, the word “dashboard” gives me flashbacks of executive conversations where I’m asked to summarize complicated information into a single square – while somehow defying […]

Contained DBs and collation conflict

The SQL Server 2012 contained database feature has an interesting behavior when it comes to collation considerations between the SQL Server instance default collation and a user database collation.  I see this new behavior as a benefit, but rather than tell you about it, I’ll step through a demonstration instead. First of all, this demonstration […]