Availability Groups were introduced in SQL Server 2012 and have quickly become the forefront of high availability for the SQL Server Database Engine Services. In prior versions of SQL Server, true high availability was not a complete solution packaged with the native installation and feature set. While mirroring was introduced in SQL Server 2005 and provided a much-needed advance towards achieving highly available data services, mirroring still required much customization to effectively provide a true high availability solution.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
Azure Hosted Services offers several really awesome features over using physical servers or standard VM infrastructure. Two of these are the staged deployment model and management SDK, which includes a powershell module. Using these two features, we are going to build a deployment script that deploys a new set of services (servers) in Azure, using a Virtual IP swap to replace the existing production instances only after the new deployment is fully running.
A few weeks ago I stumbled up on this book review of Naked Statistics by Nathan Yau. The introduction on Amazon promises us the following: Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called "sexy." From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds.
A few days ago there was an interesting question on the forum: How can I get None in each cell of a table in the report if no rows are returned? If I use “No rows message” property, header is not displaying on the report but I would like to get headers along with “NONE” in each column if no rows returned. So the "No rows message" property was not what the OP wanted.
I’m delighted to announce I will be giving a session at ITPROceed, a new event in Belgium for the IT Professional. From their website: ITPROceed is a joint effort between the ITProfessional User Groups with the strong support of Microsoft to bring you the best on the Cloud OS, System Center, SQL, Office 365, Windows 8, Unified Communications, Lync, Azure and SharePoint. My session is titled Get More Out Of Your Data Visualizations.
It's time for another T-SQL Tuesday! This month's blog party is hosted by Boris Hristov (blog| twitter) and the subject is about interviews and hiring. First I thought about writing a rant about the beginning of every interview and hiring process: recruiters. You can't live with them and you can live without them. But I noticed James Serra (blog | twitter) has already written extensively about this subject. Then I considered writing about all of those crazy job adverts that are floating around, but Thomas LaRock (blog | twitter) has already covered this nicely.
I ran into a tool named Gource while searching for ways to visualize activity from my git repositories. Besides creating awesome visualizations from my code, it also has the capability to take custom logs for visualizations. Which led me to think, what if I fed in blog posts from LessThanDot, using the primary categories in place of directory paths? The color-coding for my git repositories is assigned by file type, but here I assigned colors to each of the authors.
I have an Azure VM that was created back when the C: drives had an 30GB size limitation (which leaves maybe 8GB after all the OS files, Windows updates, etc). This present a considerable challenge when I go to install something that has to be installed on the C: Drive, like Visual Studio 2013. Finding a path from a 30GB primary drive to (anything larger) was a little rough, most of the information I found said you had delete the VM, download the drive, attach it to another VM as a secondary drive, extend it, then re-upload it and do some extra magic to make it usable as a primary drive again and then re-create the VM.
I recently came across the following error message when I tried to look at the batches in the Integration Management section of MDS: 515: A database error has occurred. Please contact your system administrator Too bad I am the system administrator on that machine… Anyway, after some searching it came out the MDS stored procedure _udpEntityStagingAllBatchesByModelGet_ throws a bit of a temper tantrum if one of the batch tags used in the staging process of a leaf member is NULL.
Since I write at different places – this blog, Intense School and MSSQLTips.com – someone recently asked me if I could provide an overview from time to time to keep track of all the published material. It makes it easier to follow and it’s also a chance for me to promote my material to readers who perhaps don’t visit the other sites very often. Anyway, these are all the articles I’ve put out since my initial announcement on this blog: