FlashArray

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, most of what I’ve covered requires SQL Server to participate in the snapshot: the write IO freeze, the metadata backup, the coordinated workflow. This post covers the other side of that coin: crash-consistent cloning. No write freeze. No backup. No point-in-time recovery. Just a raw volume clone that SQL Server recovers from automatically when you attach it.

What Is a Crash-Consistent Snapshot?

When people talk about snapshot backups for SQL Server, they often jump straight to application-consistent snapshots, the kind where SQL Server is asked to freeze write IO before the snapshot. That freeze guarantees every page on disk reflects a logically consistent database state.

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to the SQL Server OS. In this post, I’m bringing T-SQL Snapshot Backup into a Hyper-V cluster environment, with database files on VHDXs backed by a Pure Storage FlashArray Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). Hyper-V adds a few extra layers to manage at the hypervisor level, but the SQL Server side of the story is identical. Let’s walk through it.

In this post, the fifth in our series, I want to illustrate an example of using the T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to seed Availability Groups (AGs) with storage-based snapshots. Efficiently seeding an Availability Group is essential for maintaining high availability and ensuring effective disaster recovery. With the introduction of T-SQL Snapshot Backup in SQL Server 2022, snapshots can now be created at the storage layer. This advancement significantly speeds up the initialization of secondary replicas, particularly in environments that handle large databases.

In this post, the fourth in our series, I want to share an example demonstrating SQL Server 2022’s T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in a scenario where a database spans multiple storage arrays. If you’re dealing with multi-array environments, you’ll appreciate how this technique freezes database write I/O to take coordinated snapshots across volumes on two FlashArrays. In this post, I’ll walk you through the process, point out some of the script’s key elements, and show you how long the write I/O pause takes.

In this post, the third in our series on using T-SQL Snapshot Backup, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and then perform point-in-time database restores using that snapshot backup as the base, but this time using an Azure Virtual Machine. We will explore how to manage Azure storage-level operations, such as taking snapshots, cloning snapshots, and executing an instantaneous point-in-time database restore from the snapshot with minimal impact on your infrastructure. Additionally, I will demonstrate a PowerShell script that utilizes dbatools and Azure Az modules to automate the process.

In this post, the second in our series, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and perform point-in-time database restores using a snapshot backup as the base of the restore. We will explore how to manage storage-level operations, such as cloning snapshots and executing an instantaneous point-in-time restore of a database from the snapshot with minimal impact on your infrastructure. Additionally, I will demonstrate a PowerShell script that utilizes dbatools and the PureStoragePowerShellSDK2 modules to automate the process.

Traditional SQL Server backups can struggle with large databases, resulting in longer backup times and resource contention. T-SQL Snapshot Backup, a new feature in SQL Server 2022, addresses these challenges by allowing storage-based snapshots to be coordinated through T-SQL. This feature delivers faster, more efficient backups, especially for large-scale environments with the most aggressive of recovery objectives.

Anatomy of a Full Backup

Before we start learning about T-SQL Snapshot backup, let’s establish what a backup in SQL Server is. When a backup is initiated in SQL Server, several things occur. Follow along in Figure 1 below; here, you see a database with database files on Disk A and a transaction log file on Disk B.

Welcome back to the fifth installment of our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this post, we’re diving into a hands-on demonstration of using the Pure Storage FlashArray API to track replication performance between two arrays. This is especially useful for DBAs and storage admins, who must ensure their data replication processes run smoothly and efficiently. A typical scenario here is ensuring a snapshot is entirely replicated between sites before kicking off some other process. Following this demo, you’ll learn how to monitor replication status and verify the completion of snapshot transfers between arrays.

Welcome back to the fourth installment of our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this post, you’ll learn how to use Purity Tags to classify workloads, giving you the ability to search and manage resources in FlashArray and Cloud Block Store based on the types of workloads you’re running. Using the techniques in this post, combined with those learned in our last post, Using the Pure Storage PowerShellSDK2 - Part 3 - Getting Performance Data from FlashArray you can retrieve information about subsets of objects in your FlashArray or Cloud Block Store across several performance dimensions.

Welcome back to the third installment of our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2. In this post, we’ll learn how to retrieve performance data from FlashArray and Cloud Block Store. Here, you’ll uncover the intricacies of extracting performance data across several object types, including Volumes and Hosts. We will dig into the object model that exposes crucial performance insights. Moreover, we’ll delve into the realm of performance analysis, addressing common customer questions such as: