Availability groups provide some exciting features in mixing high availability and disaster recovery; however, from a performance consideration, there are a few drawbacks.  With the advances in SQL Server 2016, our guest Jimmy May from SanDisk, set out to test the features and see if they could get some really high performance out of an availability group with two synchronous replicas. In this episode he talks with us about some of his findings and some of the pains associated with getting there. 

Show notes are available at http://sqldatapartners.com/2016/12/31/availability-group-improvements/ and have fun on the SQL trail!

Storage testing and validation is something what we to add under roles and responsibilities as DBAs. Every database we ever manage is going to need one, but how often do we kick the tires? Many times we’re basically told to go verify that array or we’re doing this POC, we’re testing this new storage, but are we really only testing connectivity?  In this episode of the podcast, we chat with Argenis Fernandez about how he goes about testing a SAN array and the important metrics you should consider for your storage.  If you are still using SQLIO or even Diskspeed to test the IO for your SQL Server, don't miss today's episode.

The shownotes for today's episode is found at http://sqldatapartners.com/2016/12/21/episode-75-testing-storage-devices/ and have fun on the SQL trail.

As the year 2016 comes to a close, Steve and I share our thoughts on our accomplishments for the year and what lies in store for 2017.

At some point all data administrators will have to tune their environments and there are may ways you might go about that.  In this episode, we talk with Pinal Dave about how he does performance tuning and the thought process behind the approach.