No rugby on last weekend so I didn’t have anything to distract me from working. On another note, my flat has never been cleaner!

So last week Microsoft announced Availability Groups for SQL Server on Linux.

This is a big announcement as one of the first things I noticed when playing around with a SQL instance on Linux was the lack of high availability features. (I wrote a post on manually setting up transaction log shopping here).

Microsoft hasn’t released a stripped down version of Availability Groups either. They’ve said in the post that:-

all capabilities that make Availability Groups a flexible, integrated and efficient HADR solution are available on Linux as well

So are we looking at SQL on Linux moving towards an edition that will rival its windows counterpart in features and usability? I think that’s what Microsoft’s end goal will be, a platform independent relation database system.

That for us as SQL Server DBAs mean interesting times ahead. In the future not only will we be looking at the usual options when building our SQL Server instances, we’ll be looking at the pros and cons of the supporting operating system and then making our decisions. Could lead to some interesting design room discussions.

I’ve said before that I think this is great. It’s opening up a whole new world to me as a DBA, I love learning new areas of technology so I can’t wait to get my hands on this and start playing around.

Have a good week!

Man, if there was an award for procrastinating I’d definitely be in with a shout for today (I write these posts on the weekend).

So I’m half writing this sitting on my balcony with a beer, one eye on the Italy v Ireland Six Nations game and trying not to think about all the work I should be doing.

Anyway one thing I’ve been thinking about is documentation. Nobody likes doing it but oh boy did it help me out last week.

We had one of our production servers fail during a RAM upgrade. No biggie as it was a passive node in a cluster but whilst we were writing up our steps to rebuild one of my colleagues forwarded a wiki page detailing the server’s configuration. Awesome stuff, we had a complete list of what we needed to do, the thing that made me laugh was that it was written….by me.

I honestly don’t remember writing that document and yes, it was slightly out of date but it had steps on it which we would have completely forgotten to do if we didn’t have it.

So yes, writing documentation sucks but it’s one of those chores that can really help you out.

So don’t put it off, get that code/server spec/process documented. You’ll thank yourself in the end.

Have a good week.