Self-discipline: How You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

(Fight by Jorge Gonzales) The first and best victory is to conquer self.  – Plato – One week into 2017 and we’re all still hyped up about our New Year’s resolutions. I previously wrote about what New Year’s resolutions are all about and since then have been reviewing keyword searches that have led to my […]

What New Year’s Resolutions Are All About

The Christmas holidays are usually time for me to do more reading, studying and reflection. It’s also when things slow down a bit because a lot of people go on vacations (except when I get special requests to work on year-end projects). I use this time to reflect on what I have done in the previous year […]

What We’re Really Afraid Of

So, why haven’t you pursued that project yet? At the back of your mind, you knew you wanted to Write that blog post or article Submit a presentation abstract for a SQL Server event Volunteer to design and implement a SQL Server Availability Group solution for a customer Start that business you’ve been thinking about […]

Generating the Windows Server Failover Cluster Debug Logs

Troubleshooting Availability of SQL Server Workloads Running on Windows Server Failover Cluster - Part 4

I started this blog post with a warning mainly because I’ve seen a lot of engineers and database administrators spend so much time figuring out the root cause of why a SQL Server database running on a WSFC is offline – while it is still offline. I know because I used to be like that. […]

Reviewing the Windows Event Logs to Find Hints That Can Cause Availability Issues

Troubleshooting Availability of SQL Server Workloads Running on Windows Server Failover Cluster - Part 3

SQL Server Failover Clustered Instances (FCI) and Availability Groups (AG) depend a lot on Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC). Understanding how the underlying WSFC platform works can help us maintain availability of our databases In the first blog post in this series, I talked about how to use the Cluster Dependency Report to identify the potential […]