
Deciding between Availability Group and Clustering - Episode IV: Software side of the story
Hello all - we hope all is well with your SQL server. In this post - we're going to talk a bit about software side of the story when choosing between Clustering and Availability Group. To recap, Clustering is an established technology in which you have two or more (typically two) servers and one shared storage, in which all the SQL action happens. Availability Group is a relatively new technology that evolved from what was called Database Mirroring, in whcih bunch of independ

Availability Group is a Klingon Warrior
One thing you should know about AG is that it carries the sign of house it was born in, like a Klingon Warrior. One of the cool features is the Availability Group, which picks up where Database Mirroring has left off, is that you don't have to configure as many things in SQL as far as which server does what goes. Mostly, it has offloaded lots of inter-server communication bits to Windows Server Failover Clustering, which is great for several reasons. One of them is separation

Out of space? SQL dead? Here's what you do.
Microsoft makes it pretty easy to run a SQL database - and of course, the flip side of it is that there are gazillion improperly managed databases out there. In this post - we'd like to share a way to recover from SQL server stoppage due to insufficient log space. Have you ever had a case where SQL Server database stops working for seemingly no reason? You might have ran out of disk drive space, plain and simple. But how can this be?? You have 100GB storage and only 10GB dat
Yep. We are SQL consultants, and are telling you to stop using SQL.
Sounds stupid, right? Have we lost our minds? Well, as a matter of fact, occasionally we do suggest our clients to move some stuff out of SQL into, oh say, Amazon S3. Just did that again today. Well, here's what most people can agree: A SQL database that's twice as large, is four times as expensive. A SQL database that is thrice as large, is nine times as expensive. If you would just look at pricing of licenses and SAN units, you'll see right away. You stand to gain a lot by