What is AlwaysOn SQL HA/DR technologies?

For the past couple of years my world has been consumed in SQL building the AlwaysOn High Availability and Disaster Recovery technology in SQL Server 2012.

Quick info on the technology

 

Why is High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) strategies required?

With a growing business comes more customers, more revenue (great!!!), and more expectations from customers for the core business to be up and running at all times. This is where DBAs focus on the High Availability and Disaster Recovery strategies to ensure that the backend DBs are always up and running.

Very common things that the DBAs will focus on are – how do I minimize downtime (RTO) and how do I minimize data loss (RPO) in case of planned (such as patching) or unplanned issues – or in other terms how do I improve my availability SLA? The DBAs have to define the availability SLA of the applications and close on the business requirements. Followed by choosing, implementing and monitoring the right HA/DR solution that meets their requirements.

With SQL Server 2012 we have built two new solutions: AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and AlwaysOn Failover Cluster instance. AlwaysOn Availability Groups is conceptually similar to database mirroring and log shipping where we (SQL Server technology) move physical logs between non-shared disks across different nodes (or machines). AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances is a lot of enhancements and investments that we have done to the existing SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance solutions which uses shared disk.

There is a whole heap of new features that we have built in the AlwaysOn Availability Group (AG) solution. Such as if your application depends on multiple DBs, you can add all the DBs to a single Availability Group (AG) and failover all of them as a single unit. Say you currently have only high availability with 2 nodes (or replicas in AG) at a single local site or datacenter, however your business is growing and you have a business requirement to protect against disasters to your local site. You can add additional nodes to your AG at a Disaster Recovery site using the multiple secondaries feature of AlwaysOn AG. You can have up to 4 secondaries for a primary (i.e. 5 nodes in your AG). Now say your site is being used even more than expected, and your primary server is running 2 components to your application: a read-write and a read-only reporting component. With AlwaysOn AG’s Active Secondaries feature, you can move your read-only reporting component (application) to any of the secondaries. You can also move certain operations such as backups to your secondaries. We have also done a lot of work in improving failover time, more support for online operations, support for windows server core which requires less patching, better error detection mechanisms and many other features that you can see in the video and link below to get a better idea of the solution. We have also made a lot of investments in the tools for configuring, managing and easily monitoring the AlwaysOn AG.

This has definitely been one of the fun, exciting, complex, challenging (talk about distributed systems ), large and high impact projects that I have worked on at Microsoft. I am very excited that this is en-route to be released with SQL Server 2012.

More Info – http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/future-editions/mission-critical/SQL-Server-2012-high-availability.aspx#

Review of Mint.com as personal finance software

I have been using Microsoft Money as my personal finance software for over 4 years. Unfortunately last year Microsoft decided to discontinue the software.

I have very less requirements from a personal finance software. I want to connect directly to my relevant accounts and download the statements, let me categorize transactions, define my own categories, and pull reports. As far as reports I look a lot into comparisons in spending per category. I also like to search over a defined time-period for all transactions of a particular category (esp. used during tax times).

After much research online, my choices came down to two – either the client based Quicken, or the web based http://mint.com. The later being free, I first gave it a try.

It was pretty easy to sign-up on mint.com. After signing up, I was immediately asked to add my relevant accounts. I could either search for my financial institution, or  select from a list of popular banks and credit card companies. The list seemed pretty comprehensive, as I was even able to search and find a very local credit union where I have an account.

Upon selecting the account and entering the login information, mint.com connected to the institution and downloaded the transactions for the last 3 months. What I did not like is not having the ability to choose how far back transactions do I want to import. I must say that the auto-categorization of transactions by mint.com was pretty accurate. I was very impressed that I had to correct only of a few of the categories. It was also easy to add new categories. Another great feature was the ability to auto-apply the categories, tags etc. assigned to a transaction to other transactions with the same name.

One sore note for me was the ‘splitting’ transaction feature. There are times when a transaction can be categorized in multiple categories. In MS Money a transaction could be assigned to multiple categories with appropriate amounts, however in mint.com the transaction itself gets split into multiple transactions. There seems to be a 1:1 relationship between a transaction and a category. I also did not find a way to change the amount of a transaction.

The ‘budget’ and the ‘notification’ features of mint.com was pretty easy to setup. With budgets, it was very easy to select categories or sub-categories and add the appropriate budget amounts. There was a nice visual indicator which should the month to date spending for the category wrt. the budgeted amount. The notification feature enabled me to setup multiple emails (mine and my wife’s) to send notifications. I could have also selected sending messages to my phone, however did not. There were a bunch of thresholds that could be set for sending notifications, such as Low Balance, Bill Reminder, Overbudget, Bank Fees, Large Purchases, and Large Deposits.

 

The reporting piece of mint.com was disappointing. There were a bunch of pre-canned reports, however customization seemed limited. I was able to filter by accounts, however was not able to filter by categories. The basic options to customize reports was very less, leading to too much noise in the reports. MS Money had an amazing user customization for reporting purposes.

To end mint.com is definitely a good user friendly software for basic users for personal financing tracking. The account and transaction management interface and process has been very well streamlined for the user. The iPhone app for mint.com is also a very nice add on. However mint.com is missing some features required for folks more involved in personal finance. This is in the transaction splitting, and mainly reporting areas. Folks who know more about reporting feature of mint.com let me know how to filter categories.

I think I will plop down the money required for getting Quicken and give it a good try. I do hate saying goodbye to Microsoft Money, however looking forward to something new.

Sony VAIO P

  I got my Toy for the year – YEAH!!!

Got the Sony VAIO P w/ 128GB SSD this weekend. This is definitely a sweet looking and working machine.

I wanted a netbook size machine mainly for travel purposes. So my main requirements was small size, light weight, decent HD, decent resolution  and good enough for basic browsing, email, storing photos and blogging.

The Sony VAIO P gives me my basic requirements, and much much more. The size is amazing, the screen resolution is unbelievable, 128GB SSD and many others such as built in GPS, nice usable keyboard, wireless b/g/n etc.

Screen – The 1600 x 768 resolution on the 8” LCD screen makes it very usable. This is absolutely the most amazing of all the netbooks I have seen.

Keyboard/mouse – the keyboard despite the size is very usable. The keys are decently spaced, and easy to type. I must say it does take a bit of getting used to, however after a day I am getting more familiar with the keyboard (typing this blog on Live Writer on the Vaio). The only thing I do not like is the smaller “Shift” button on the right side, and wish had a separate “Home” and “End” buttons.

The pointing stick (or nipple) mouse was relatively easy for me as I use it on my work “lenovo” machine. I do need to change the sensitivity of the mouse.

Few irritating negatives – In terms of heat, this machine does get a bit toasty in the bottom – however is not unbearable. I have also noticed a few dropped wireless connections.

Well another issue was the sheer number of applications pre-installed on the machine. I wanted to rebuild it, however first decided to just un-install EVERY application that looked unnecessary. This really helped speed up the system. The only application from Sony I had to keep was the wireless manager – “smartwi”. This was required to turn on the GPS.

Another minute rant is that the 128GB SSD model is only available in ‘black’ color (would have liked the Red). This machine does cost 1500 – so an expensive “toy”, however worth every penny.

There are a lot many features I need to play around and review. Until now have loved this machine, will add more info as I use this machine more.

Help requested from the community –

Have folks installed Win 7 beta on this machine, and got gps to work successfully. If yes, please let me know. The GPS is the only reason currently I have not moved to Win 7 beta.

 

What have I been working on?

This is a new product from Microsoft, and we released in this years CES.

Go to http://gettag.mobi with the browser of you mobile phone to download the mobile application, and scan or take the picture of the above image with your phone.

This application is available for many mobile platforms such as Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian, Blackberry etc.

Mezer tools

For sometime now I have been using this free tool called Mezer tools for screen capture. The feature I use the most is the ability to capture an arbitrary rectangle. This is extremely useful while sending screen-shots on email to show data from programs or bugs etc.

Upon pressing Win+S (or invoking “screen capture” from the tool in the taskbar), the user can select a start point by clicking on the screen, and then an end point by clicking on the screen again. The rectangle space between the start and the end point is saved to the clipboard as an image. The user can then paste this image to the email (such as outlook) or word or any such application.

Earlier this was  a painful process, where first I had to click on PrtSc (Print Screen) or Alt+PrtSc to save the whole image to clipboard, and then paste the image on an application like MSPaint. I would then use the Select option to draw a rectangle around the area I want to capture, and copy that desired sub-section of the image to the clipboard. Now all this messing around with PrtSc and MSPaint is replaced with Win+S.

The Mezer tools also has some other features like Calipers (to known size between two points horizontal or vertical), Text Generator (to fill the clipboard with a sting of desired characters – useful in testing), Color Grabber (where you can drag a dropper image to the desired color on the screen to get the color value) etc. Some of these other features could also be useful for some.

Merzer Tools options

 

The footprint of the Mezer Tools is also pretty small.

 

I would definitely recommend using Mezer tools in case you have to pass around screen shots as a part of your job.