Month: March 2019

Simulating a Multi Subnet cluster for setting up SQL Server Always On Availability Groups – lab setup

In this article, we are going to see how to create a multi subnet cluster spanning across multiple subnets for lab purposes. Creating such an environment should help creating Availability groups simulating a far replica residing in a different Data Center (Subnet) acting as a disaster recovery site in your lab for learning/experimenting real world scenarios.

Let’s get into action, below is what we are going to setup for our lab purposes to simulate a multi subnet cluster environment and create an Always On Availability group.

  • Two nodes (Replicas) residing in my production/primary Data center (Subnet 192.168.1.x) – Let’s say these two replicas are used for High availability, assuming we have low latency, since they are residing in the same data center (Probably in the same rack), I will set them up with Synchronous Mode with Automatic Failover
  • Third node (Replica) sitting in my disaster recovery data center which is geographically dispersed (Subnet 192.168.2.x) – Assuming it’s connected over WAN and is used just for DR purposes, I would set this replica in Asynchronous Mode with Manual Failover

For more reading…go to below link.

Simulating a Multi Subnet cluster for setting up SQL Server Always On Availability Groups – lab setup

SSMS 18.0 – SQL Server Priority Boost

I’ve been playing with SQL Server 2019/SSMS 18.0 since past few days and noticed something really awesome, there’s no more “Boost SQL Server Priority” option is SSMS 18.0 !!!! It’s probably one of the most requested feature in SSMS by DBA community.

The name “Boost SQL Server Priority” sounds like an amazing switch which makes SQL run on steroids, but in reality it’s the other way around.

So, what exactly does this option do?
Ans: It doesn’t matter in year 2019, Let’s just pretend we never had this option 🙂  Well, If you are still curious what this is about, enabling this setting will make SQL Server process run in “HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS”. Almost every process in windows run in “NORMAL_EXECUTION_CONTEXT” including network drivers, Storage drivers, I/O drivers and etc etc etc. In other words, you are making SQL Server run in higher execution context on CPU than almost any other process on your server.

So, when do we need to enable this on our SQL Servers?
Ans: Never. There’s a reason why microsoft removed this option from SSMS.

Enough background, see what I am talking about in the below screenshots.

Cheers!

SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3 is here…

Microsoft announced SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3 in SQL bits (If you are not aware of what SQL bits is, it’s European version of SQL PASS) Keynote on Friday, first of March 2019. I really didn’t got chance to Install SQL 2019 initial release of CTP when it got released sometime around  Sep 2018, In this blog post let’s take a quick Screenshot tour of Installing SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3 on Windows Server 2016.

First thing first, we need to download media from Microsoft.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2019#Install

In this case, I am installing on Win Server 2016, So I picked Option 1.

As highlighted in the above screenshot, I opted to download ISO file and have a copy for myself so that I can use this to Install on a different machine in future without any hassles.  Well, It’s all done in few mins…

Now, let’s go to the actual Installation part.

1.
2.

3.

4. I am interested in just the DB Engine for now.

5. Provided my service accounts

6. Time to configure Data Directories and don’t forget to visit TempDB tab.

7. Next—-> Next and Done!

Nothing fancy here with Installation. Now, I downloaded and Installed latest release preview of SSMS which supports SQL Server 2019 and below is the output of @@Version.

Note: If you have previous releases of 2019 CTP installed on the same machine, you can’t perform an Inplace upgrade to CTP 2.3, However you can have them side by side without any issues. In other words, It’s not required to uninstall previous release of CTP in order to Install 2019 CTP 2.3 as a different Instance.

BTW, my favorite feature of this release is “Accelerated DB Recovery and Instant Rollback for long running transactions”. There are few other new features added related to SSAS and Big data Clusters as well, but I am really not interested in those at this moment.

Cheers!