DBA Unfiltered

  • Mechanical robotic mule carrying multiple servers and data storage units on a mountain path

    Contained AG Not Synchronizing After Planned Failover: How ADR Saved Us

    We had a SQL Server 2022 contained AG that consistently took exactly 10 minutes to recover after every planned manual failover. Not 9 minutes. Not 11. 10 minutes on the dot. Both replicas would sit in a Not Synchronizing state, every database showed Recovering, and our fastest path back to being online again was often…

    TheUnfilteredDBA
  • Humanoid robot holding a tablet showing system analysis, interacting with smiling IT specialist in office.

    We Built an AI-Assisted Operating Model for SQL Server Migrations

    Disclaimer/ Edit: This post was heavily “polished” and rewritten with AI. The content is mine and true but I’m sure you’ll detect the AI patterns in this one :). The Problem with Traditional DBA Operations If you’ve worked in enterprise SQL Server long enough, you know how migrations usually go. A request comes in to…

    TheUnfilteredDBA

  • Database Crash Recovery Takes Forever After Planned Manual Failover

    Weekend Patching, Business As Usual Today I was patching a bunch of servers at a client as Microsoft released their most recent Security Patch for SQL Server that addresses an exploit / vulnerability found after patch Tuesday. Read more on it here. I went through the normal patching routine for an AG; working through all…

    TheUnfilteredDBA

  • Read-Only Routing Isn’t Working, What Gives?

    Problem You want to implement read-only routing for your Always on Availability Group so your reading workloads can be offloaded from your primary replica to one of your secondary replicas. But when it comes time to test, your reading queries aren’t hitting your readable secondary replicas like you expected. What gives? Here are some things…

    TheUnfilteredDBA

  • ChatGPT Series Part 3: Understanding SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options

    Part 3 in the ChatGPT series where ChatGPT gives me topics to blog about; High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) options. There are several options SQL Server offers to keep your databases both highly available, and redundant in the event of a disaster. The three I’d like to chat about today are: Always on Availability…

    TheUnfilteredDBA

  • How to Set up Replication in an Always On Availability Group

    Replication can be a daunting technology to work with at times. Combine that with Always on Availability Groups (AAGs) and you may find yourself in a head scratcher of a situation. When deploying replication on a standalone server, it is not uncommon to see that same server act as a local distributor, meaning the distribution…

    TheUnfilteredDBA