Avoid These Failover Clustering Mistakes That Can Cost a SQL Server DBAs Job

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a customer several years ago. I was asked to join a conference call to discuss a new SharePoint 2013 farm deployment. My involvement was limited to designing and deploying a SQL Server 2012 Availability Group for all of their environments – a different vendor was engaged to […]

How Well Do You Know Your Microsoft High Availability Technologies?

Are you up to the challenge? Do you have what it takes to design a highly available SQL Server system? Feeling helpless and confused when dealing with Windows Server Failover Clustering  (WSFC) for your SQL Server databases? You’re not alone. I’ve heard the same thing from thousands of SQL Server administrators throughout my entire career. […]

The Traffic Light In Your Datacenter

How This One Simple Yet Very Important Concept Helped Me Understand What Windows Server Failover Clustering Is All About

You know how it feels like to stare at this for a very long time (I ended up having to wear eyeglasses because of it.) Better yet, try it. Just for 5 minutes straight without blinking. But staring at a computer monitor for a long time isn’t the real issue. It’s the confusion of trying to […]

An Underrated Feature: Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) with SQL Server Failover Clustered Instances

In a previous blog post, I talked about the benefits of using cluster shared volumes (CSVs) for your SQL Server 2014 and higher failover clustered instances (FCIs). It’s also interesting how SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft MVP Argenis Fernandez (blog | Twitter) responded to a Twitter post I shared about the blog post […]

SQL Server Professionals Shouldn’t Hate The Word “SALES”

There’s a reason why you’re a SQL Server professional – you love working with data. You signed up for a job that looks at SQL Server databases, optimize queries, build servers and create business intelligence (BI) solutions. Fixing corrupted data pages and making queries run from 10 minutes to a few seconds get you really excited. […]