It’s that time of the month… the time when all of the T-SQL bloggers have a party and blog about a specific topic. This month, the host is my friend Jason Brimhall (b/t). The topic that he has selected is “Sharpen Something”. Specifically, he wants us to:
I am asking you to not only write a post but to do a little homework – first. In other words, plan to do something, carry out that plan, and then write about the experience.
Immediately, I’m thinking of something that I could write on. Then I read on and see this other part of his post where he has some examples:
You know you are extremely deficient at a certain SQL Skill. Tell me what that skill is and develop a plan to get better at that skill. Report on the implementation of this skill and how you are doing at improving. Maybe that skill is about Extended Events, PoSH or availability groups.
And now I’m thinking that Jason’s picking on me. He knows that there is one particular skill that I’m deficient on, and I’ve been meaning to work on it. So Jason, thank you for prodding me along.
To wrap up, Jason says:
In recap, this is an invite to make a short term goal covering the next two weeks. Tell everybody what that goal is (in your tsql tuesday post of course) and how you went about creating a plan for that goal and how you have progressed during the two week interval.
“Tell me what the skill is”
So what is the skill that I’m deficient on? It’s just the most popular feature released in SQL 2012: Availability Groups (did you notice how Jason even mentioned that above? See, he’s picking on me!) It’s not that I’m completely ignorant about Availability Groups – it’s just that I’ve never had the opportunity to work with this feature. I’ve even tried to work with it before, however higher priority things keep popping up, delaying my getting around to this.
“Develop a plan to get better”
The short and simple plan is to create an environment where I have Availability Groups installed, and utilize it on some databases.
The longer plan goes like this: Since Availability Groups is built on top of Windows Server Failover Clustering, I need to:
- Build an environment where I have a domain controller and two servers that have clustering implemented.
- Install SQL Server on the two servers.
- Create a few databases – with data.
- Create an Availability Group with these databases.
- Test the secondary replicas being read-only.
- Repeat for the following environments to assess differences:
- Windows Server 2008R2 with SQL 2012
- Windows Server 2012R2 with SQL 2012
- Windows Server 2012R2 with SQL 2014
- Windows Server 2012R2 with SQL 2016
- Windows Server 2016 with SQL 2016
“Report on the implementation of this skill”
This is the section where I humble myself. To date, I have created three virtual machines running Windows Server 2008R2. They aren’t even in a domain yet. A setback that I faced was that I already had a domain set up for this… but since I’m using evaluation edition of Windows, they had expired. Everything had to be rebuilt, and now I’m running into domain setup issues. It seems to me that the Windows setup is harder than the SQL setup will be. But I will persist, and this will be done.
Because I am extremely deficient in this skill, and I need to be working with it.
