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”.
Read More »What is not contained in contained Availability Groups
This month’s #tsql2sday is hosted by John McCormack who asks us to share some useful snippets of code that can help us in our everyday jobs.
Well, honestly, this is more or less what my blog is mostly about anyway: sharing insights, scripts, and code snippets that I found to be helpful in my day-to-day job as a SQL Server consultant.
Read More »T-SQL Tuesday #143 – Short Powershell code to move DB files in AlwaysOn
Following my presentation of “How to HADR Your SQL Server Jobs” at the HA/DR PASS Virtual Group yesterday, David Klee (@kleegeek) and I continued chatting for a bit longer after the recording was concluded. During which, the MSX/TSX feature of SQL Server came up, and David suggested that I’d utilize my newly earned MVP status to push a feature request to expand these capabilities.
Read More »Feature Request – Expand MSX/TSX Capabilities for HADR
Imagine the following: 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 which you need to be 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 would fail (whether because the database is inaccessible or because it’s read-only). Additionally, you would need to consider the possibility of a failover where the Primary and Secondary servers would switch roles.
This means that you would have to, first, create these jobs on both servers, and 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.
[For the sake of this article, let’s ignore the fact that most people don’t even think about it, and leave all of their important jobs on the Primary server only, while ignoring the risks of what would happen when their Primary server crashes and fails over to the Secondary]