Tom's blog

I recently received the feedback results of the presentation I gave for the Belgian SQL Users Group.

3 questions were asked:

• Fulfilled this evening your technical expectations?
• How do you evaluate the speaker about his presentation skills?
• How do you evaluate the speaker about his knowledge of the subject?

The results:

What I can conclude is that I should work on my presentation skills (which I already knew). I have the tendency to speak very fast when I’m nervous.

Something I don’t understand very well is that I got 2 scores of 3 for ‘Fulfilled this evening your technical expectations?’, where most of the scores were 7 or 8. It seems that I have really disappointed these 2 persons. If you are one of them, please feel free to contact me, so I can learn what I did wrong, or what I can do to improve this!

Tom

Last week I gave a presentation to the Belgian SQL Users Group about database forensics.

You can download the presentation here.

Thanks to Kevvie Fowler, I may also put the contents (demo databases, forensic scripts) available for download. The included scripts are also published on the Application Forensics website, check there for updates.

If you want to learn more about the subject, take a look at the SQL Server Forensic Analysis book!

Tom

In this guide, I will instruct step-by-step on how to create an HADR configuration between Denali SQL servers. For more information about this new high availability type see my post: CTP1 for SQL ‘Denali’ available for download

First a little overview of my test environment, I’m running Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V on a laptop. The host is also a domain controller and has the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target running to provide shared disk storage via iSCSI to my guest machines. The iSCSI Software Target is part of Storage Server, but can be installed separately.

I have 4 Hyper-V guests running, 2x 2 nodes within a Windows Failover Cluster (requirement for Denali HADR) with denali clustered.

So let’s start with our setup:

1. Enable the HADR service on both clustered denali instances 

• Open SQL Server Configuration Manager
• Select SQL Server Services
• Right-click on your SQL Server, in my case SQL Server (INST1) and select Properties
• Select the SQL HADR tab and click the checkbox Enable SQL HADR Service
• Click Ok on the warning dialog box
  
• Restart your SQL Services (Attention: SQL HADR requires a Windows Failover Cluster, so do not stop the service through the Services Control Panel, but go to the Failover Cluster Manager, select your SQL Server Instance, and take it offline. When everything is offline, bring it online again)

2. Create an Availability Group

• Open SQL Server Management Studio
• Select Management
• Right-click Availability Groups and select New Availability Group
• Click Next
  
• Give your new Availability Group a name and click Next
• Select which user databases you want to add to your Availability Group. If your database is not listed, you can select Show user databases not meeting requirements. This will give you the reason why a certain db cannot be added to the AG. Then click Next 
• In the Specify Replicas screen, you can add the instances you want to be enable as HADR in the secondary role, after you have done this, click Next
  
  
• Next you have the overview screen, click Finish to start configuring the HADR setup
  
• Next you get a progress screen, click Next to finish the HADR setup.
  

That’s it for this guide. I will continue playing with HADR and post some reviews afterwards.

Your remarks are welcome.

Tom

Microsoft has recently released CU11 for SQL 2008 SP1 and CU1 for SQL 2008 SP2

The cumulative update table for R2 doesn’t change

For SQL 2008 the cumulative update table becomes:

To find out which version you are currently running, check out this blogpost.

Tom

Microsoft has recently released its first CTP (Community Technical Preview) of the next version of SQL Server, code-named ‘Denali’.

In this first CTP, changes have been made to the Database Engine and Integration Services. Other components remain unchanged.

The Database Engine now includes a new high availability model, named HADR. HADR makes use of Availability Groups in which a selected set of databases can fail over as a single unit. These Availability Groups contain replica’s of the databases. Three types of replica’s can be identified:

• Primary Role: the current primary replica. Only one replica can be the primary role at a given time.
• Secondary Role: the availability replica is up-to-date and can become a primary role. Replica’s in the secondary role can be configured for client connections and read-only access making it useful for reporting purposes.
• Resolving role: indicates that the current state of the availability replica is uncertain or changing.

The CTP is available for download here.

Check back soon for more information about the new features of ‘Denali’.

Tom

Microsoft has recently released CU4 for SQL 2008 R2

This makes the cumulative update table for R2 as follows:

For SQL 2008 the cumulative update table doesn’t change:

To find out which version you are currently running, check out this blogpost.

Tom

There is a new build from PAL (Performance Analyses of Logs), it contains 3 new treshold files (Exchange 2003, 2010 and Communications Server2007 R2), so if you only use PAL to troubleshoot your SQL Environment, there is no need to update.

Download PAL v2.05 | PAL Home Page

Tom

The new build from PAL contains some bug fixes, a date globalization change and some updates to threshold files.

Download PAL v2.04 | PAL Home Page

Tom

Microsoft has recently released SQL 2008 SP2

The cumulative update table for R2 doesn’t change

For SQL 2008 the cumulative update table becomes:

To find out which version you are currently running, check out this blogpost.

Tom

As of today, you can download PAL v2.

What is PAL?
Ever had a performance problem, but don’t know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format) and analyzes it using complex, but known thresholds (provided). The tool generates an HTML based report which graphically charts important performance counters and throws alerts when thresholds are exceeded. The thresholds are originally based on thresholds defined by the Microsoft product teams and members of Microsoft support, but continue to be expanded by this ongoing project. This tool is not a replacement of traditional performance analysis, but it automates the analysis of performance counter logs enough to save you time

Downloads | PAL Home Page

Tom