August 2013

How to Tell If Your Users are Connecting to the Availability Group Listener

You’ve spent a lot of time planning and building out a new SQL Server 2012 environment complete with Availability Group Listeners, but how can you be sure the end users are connecting to the listener and not directly to the SQL Server instance? So why would we care about this?  To begin with, if the users are not connecting to the listener, then upon a failover to another replica, those users would have to connect to a different SQL Server instance name.  Having a single point of connection is crucial for the high availability process to work correctly. In a...

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PASS Summit 2013 – You Ain’t From Around Here Are Ya?

I know what y’all are thinkin’, what’s Charlotte got to do with SQL Server?  Just hear me out.  There’s a lot more to Charlotte than NASCAR, fried chicken, and rednecks. I assume most of the 5000 attendees have never been to Charlotte, and probably don’t know much about the area.  To help everyone out, I have made a list of useful tips. My history and why you should listen to me. I begged my management for nearly a decade to send me to the PASS Summit, and this year they finally granted my request.  And to top it off even more,...

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