I was recently asked about T-SQL Snapshot backups on secondary replicas, which I hadn’t looked at for many years as it’s kind of a niche item. I was definitely surprised to find little caveats here and there, thus you get this wonderful post. If you’re unfamiliar with T-SQL Snapshot backups, it’s a way to flush […]
This used to be a very hot topic around SQL Server 2016 when automatic seeding first came out, then everyone learned how automatic seeding was just manual seeding but done for you and the topic went away. A decade later, it’s somehow back to being a hot topic. I guess all that is old is […]
This issue was a fun one, brought to me due to a single replica in an availability group constantly having an issue where it seemed that SQL Server just stopped processing certain requests. If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself, “Just one replica in the topology? What’s different with that one replica?” then give […]
I meant to write this almost a year ago, but then I was asked to take a look at high cluster service privileged time usage and realized I had forgotten! I guess better late than never? If you’re using WSFC integrated AGs (cluster_type = WSFC) then the cluster database is the location in which availability […]
I have a long history shitting on CrowdStrike – and well, with their past it’s pretty warranted – but antivirus software is general does bother the hell out of me. You’re essentially installing something that interrogates everything on your system and injects itself everywhere hoping it stops a known issue but generally ends up causing […]
Contained Availability Groups are the most recent update to the Availability Groups feature, and a great update at that! They are completely new in SQL Server 2022, and like any new feature (or even mature ones) there will be some bugs. Enter in some Access Violations (AVs) that may occur when creating a new contained […]
Read Scale Availability Groups can be pretty useful in the right places and for the right things and were a latest feature update for AGs until Contained AGs came along in 2022. Read Scale AGs don’t integrate with clustering of any type and they behave somewhat as mirroring used to where there is no real […]
I’ve been playing around with some different NVMe drives lately, looking at different performance characteristics and when I saw the output of some initial testing it made me want to write a quick post. Today, cloud is still the hotness (well, if you get past everyone saying AI like they said ML a few years […]
I don’t often find many people using FileStream in their databases (which isn’t a bad or good thing, in my opinion, just a statement of fact). Some technologies in SQL Server use it behind the scene, such as FileTable or Hekaton, and there isn’t really any getting around it in those cases. However, I was […]
There was a question that came up on the MCM mailing list about what are these files: model_msdbdata.mdf, model_msdblog.ldf, model_replicatedmaster.mdf, model_replicatedmaster.ldf? It was pointed out that the files don’t show up in the typical DMVs and seem to not really be used at the moment. These are the databases used as the basis for the […]
