T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community. It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic (b|t) and this month’s edition is hosted by Kevin Chant (b|t), SQL dude and fellow cyclist! Kevin wants to know what our “Fantasy SQL Feature” is.
I asked my LinkedIn connections a very similar question in my “Question of the Week” there. Hit the link to see a lot of different responses.
One of the recurring themes and possibly the most common was:
Load Balanced Writes. Unless I’ve completely missed something, there is nothing in SQL Server natively that will allow you to write to different copies of the database (leaving out Merge and Bi-Directional Transactional Replication, because they suck and don’t scale).
Don’t get me wrong…I love read-only replicas in an Availability Group, replication for reporting, or even delayed Log Shipping. They are wonderful for taking the read traffic off an OLTP box, but if you are dying under heavy load in a very optimized setup…oh well.
Bonus Fantasy: Give me a button in the Log Shipping Setup GUI (Database Properties>>Log Shipping) that just says “Re-initialize”. Sometimes LS just falls apart and its easier to tear it down and start over. Even easier is to just back up the db, restore over the Secondary db and go. But, for the small business using LS for poor-man’s DR and no DBA on staff…give me a button. Ideally that button calls sp_ReInit_Log_Shipping @DBName = ‘MyDB’. But someone will have to write that first. I am not that someone. This may already be in the DBATools.io set of toys, but I haven’t looked, and again…small customers need a button in a GUI.
Thanks for reading!
