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Using a Cloud Witness for Clusters

On a client site recently a question was asked about the file share witness in a SQL Server failover cluster on-premise, and where to put it if you only have 2 sites. As always, it depends! Let’s look at some scenarios. Bear in mind that use of the Azure Cloud Witness requires Windows Server 2016 or later. Topology 1 Three node cluster with 2 nodes at primary and 1 at disaster recovery (DR). Most people want high availability at their “primary site” and are happy to have standalone capability at the business continuity (DR) site. To save storage costs, I

Running SQL Server in an Azure Container Instance

Azure Container Instances are still in Preview and not officially available for Windows yet, which made me smile. It took me a while to figure out how to get this working so I thought I’d share what I’ve found. Containers are great for lightweight testing of code before deployment to production servers because they can be created so quickly and they give the same environment to test in very reliably. Now that Microsoft is offering container instances in Azure it means you don’t have to worry about provisioning and configuring your own docker host/cluster. The options for deploying SQL Server

Log Shipping: It's Better Than Bad It's Good!

I'm probably showing my age by quoting an old Ren and Stimpy cartoon here, but to be fair it probably sums up log shipping pretty well. This post is focusing on using a read-only log shipping database for reporting purposes, and the limitations of read-only log shipped databases. I also share some monitoring scripts and a few ideas on how to improve restore performance without having to upgrade the hardware/software. Despite the development of AlwaysOn in recent releases of SQL Server, log shipping is still a great way to set up a copy of databases to be used for reporting.