Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • No More Drive Extender – Windows Home Server

    I guess I might need to go back to RAID. From the Windows Team Blog, there is a decision to remove Drive Extender from the next version of Windows Home Server. Based on the comments, I’m not alone in thinking this is a stupid move.

    The big challenge for me was automatically protecting the data on my various computers. Windows Home Server gave me an easy way to copy the data, and also have it on multiple drives, so it was safe in the event of a drive failure. I have heard that the larger 1TB and 2TB drives are more likely to have corruption as well, so there’s more of an issue here.

    Putting RAID together for small systems is a hassle, though perhaps R1 isn’t a big deal if you have 2TB drives. In any case, I’ll be thinking about whether I need to stick with WHS in the future or migrate to some other solution.

  • Multiple Mirrors

    Up through SQL Server 2008 R2 database mirroring has been limited to a single mirror for each database. While that does work well for many companies, as you become larger and more dependent on your computer systems, there is a need to have multiple mirrors.

    Often someone wants to failover to another database on the same network for capacity reasons if there are minor issues. Moving all clients to a secondary data center is not something you always want to do, especially as the secondary data center might not include the same level of bandwidth and may cost more.

    HADR

    In SQL 11, there is work underway to implement HADR, high availability and disaster recovery, which is an enhanced database mirroring. In this new technology, multiple mirrors are possible, allowing you to have multiple up to date copies of your data in separate locations. These are now called “replicas” and you get up to 4, according to Brent Ozar (HADRON Rocks). I didn’t see that listed, but I’m sure Brent knows more about this stuff than I do.

    The other nice things is that you can failover multiple databases together, which you put in an “availability group” and configure together. This is good since many applications might require multiple databases, and it could be important that all databases move to the same server at the same time.

    Overall this is cool, and I am looking forward to this technology being deployed. Only one replica works in CTP1, so we can’t really see this working, but it could be an amazing edition to your DR strategy in the future. One note is that this is built on Windows clustering, which no longer requires shared storage, but might require Enterprise Edition, so that will limit how widely this is deployed.

    I’ll write more on this later, but the ability to have multiple mirrors, and have multiple databases failover as a group, is something that DBAs should look forward to.

  • Cleaning Up Blogs

    I highly encourage people to blog. I know that not everyone is a writer, but I think that blogging helps build some extremely valuable skills: communication skills. We all need them, and they help us in our careers, no matter what your job.

    At SQLServerCentral, we’ve had a blog section for a number of years. We took the open source Blog.Text project from Microsoft originally, and then migrated to the free Community Server software. At some point we upgraded to a real license, and it’s worked OK. I wouldn’t say I think this is a great use of Community Server, especially as it’s embedded in the rest of the SSC site.

    However, our license is limited to 100 blogs. We have debated on an upgrade, but the Community Server people have been reluctant to increase our blog license without increasing the forums, photos, etc. and they want a fairly significant 5 figure price tag. I’m not sure it’s worth it to us, especially as blogs don’t generate a lot of traffic.

    I still get requests for blogs, and for the most part we are syndicating blogs from people and just displaying the posts from other sites. I suggest to everyone as I don’t have a good backup/export system and most of the main blog platforms (blogger, wordpress, etc) have this built in.

    As I needed to add a new one, I removed a few blogs today. I went through the list and checked a few of the blogs, and found a number that had never had a post. So I removed them to make space and keep us at 100 blogs.

    I hate to remove the change for blogging from people, but if someone is not blogging at all, then I need the space for now. I’m hoping that we’ll consider moving to a new platform, but like everything else, it’s a question of resources to integrate something else like WordPress into our site, or write our own software.

  • Buried

    Coming back after a week off, even a holiday week when traffic is relatively low, is no fun. I have tons of email, lots of articles, and more than a few meetings to get to as well as a lot of writing to catch up on.

    I had hoped to do a little writing over the holiday, but ended up just relaxing with the family and staying fairly unwired. I rarely even tweeted on vacation! A good move for me, and I think it helped refresh me, but it does mean these next few weeks will be very, very busy.