high availability

Contained Availability Groups in SQL Server 2022

2022-06-112023-03-13
1 Comment

While being an awesome feature introduced in SQL Server 2012, Availability Groups were always missing the ability to synchronize server-level objects between replicas. This finally changed 10 years later, in SQL Server 2022, with the introduction of “Contained Availability Groups”.

A contained availability group is an Always On availability group that supports:

managing metadata objects (users, logins, permissions, SQL Agent jobs etc.) at the availability group level in addition to the instance level.
specialized contained system databases within the availability group.

In this session, you will:

learn about the similarities, differences, and functionalities of contained availability groups.
see a live demo of the creation and usage of a contained availability group.
learn how to work with the feature of contained availability groups and its pros and cons.

How to HADR Your SQL Jobs

2020-06-292022-12-17

You have a couple or more SQL Servers with some sort of High Availability solution between them (AlwaysOn Availability Groups, Database Mirroring, etc.). You also have a bunch of scheduled jobs that you need to run on the Primary server.

But wait…. How would you make these jobs run only on the Primary server? After all, if they try to run on the Secondary, they might fail (whether because the database is inaccessible or because it’s read-only). Additionally, you would need to consider a failover where the Primary and Secondary servers would switch roles.

This means that you would have to create these jobs on both servers, and then implement some sort of mechanism that would detect, for each job, whether the instance it’s being executed at is currently the Primary.

There are a few ways to go about doing this. During this session, we will cover possible solutions, downfalls, tricks, and much more.