Create Alerts for Availability Groups

Now that you have your SQL Server Availability Groups up and running, how do you know if there is a problem?  You can always look at the AG Dashboard, or even better you can set up database alerts to send you an email or page you in case of certain problems.

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Patching SQL Server Availability Group Servers

Now that you have an Availability Group setup, what can you do with it?  Well, now you can patch your servers with almost zero downtime by doing rolling upgrades.  For our 24*7 economy, downtime can be very expensive in lost sales, people not being able to work, etc.   I am going to walk you through the process of installing Windows Updates on my three server cluster.

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Setting up a SQL Server 2016 Always On Availability Group

For database high availability, SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AG) are the gold standard.  These were first introduced in SQL Server 2012 and Microsoft has continued to improve and add features to help protect your data with each new version.

This is an Enterprise Edition feature, so it is not inexpensive to roll this out.

Setting this up was a great learning experience for me.  I have setup AG’s before, but I have never setup a network or clustering before, so I did learn a lot of new skills.

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Setting up SQL Server Database Mail

Today I am going to write about how to setup SQL Server Database Mail.  This is very handy as the server will be able to email you query results, whether a maintenance job succeeded or failed, status results, etc. Continue reading Setting up SQL Server Database Mail