Customer Reviews

Microsoft SQL Server High Availability

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Microsoft is attempting to move its SQL Server deeper into large scale corporate usage. And this book is a good reflection of the strategy. Bertucci directs it at IT managers, CTOs or CIOs who are looking for a "high availability" solution. He defines this as an availability of 95-99.4%. Notice that the book shies away from "extreme availability", which is more than 99.4%. As he explains, there are nonlinearities in costs for the latter that make it prohibitive for most companies. Whereas high availability is affordable in far more circumstances.

Implicitly, the book shows that Microsoft is staying away from the extreme case, for now. It cedes that ground to IBM and Oracle.

Bertucci goes into a moderate level of technical detail about what SQL Server offers for high availability. Like hardware replication using RAID arrays and hot swappable components. Though he warns of the costs of the latter. There is considerable detail about data replication and clustering. These are separate issues that have been heavily built up here in functionality. Quite mature.

As an aside, the capabilities described here also help preserve some operational distance between SQL Server and the low end open source rivals of MySQL and Postgres.

In the early days of PC's no one thought much about trying to keep up a system 24x7x365. The hardware wouldn't do it, the software wouldn't do it, and for a system that was primarily something you used for personal use on your desktop it really didn't matter much. You probably turned it off each evening anyway.

But those times have changed. The modern PC is a PC in name only. Put in a couple of high speed Pentium 4's or Opterons and you have a system more powerful than those running airline reservations systems a few years back. Add the web and e-commerce and you have systems that you really don't want to go down at all. Now you are into the realm of High Availability or since this is the computer industry - HA.

Microsoft, in the past was not too concerned with HA. If you wanted HA you had to go Unix. But in recent years Microsoft has developed Cluster Services for both the operating system and SQL Server along with other technologies to enable HA.

This book is divided into three main sections:

Understanding High Availability

Choosing the Right High Availability Approaches

Implementing High Availability.

In summary, this book is HA the Microsoft Way.