SQL Server

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.

I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both as a consultant and now in my work at Everpure, and I see the same patterns over and over. Someone spins up a VM with two vCPUs, points it at a storage subsystem (cloud or on-prem), runs a thousand threads at it, and then concludes that the storage stinks. Or the opposite, where they buy a 64 gigabit HBA, plug it into the wrong PCIe slot, and wonder why they’re leaving half of the capacity on the table.

In my planned failover walkthrough, I showed what happens when you deliberately move the primary role to another replica. That’s the easy case. Now I want to show what happens when the primary pod just disappears unexpectedly, like during a node failure or a container crash. No graceful shutdown, no demotion, just gone.

I ran two test scenarios, each cycling the primary role across all three pods by force-deleting the current primary three times in a row. First, a 5GB TPC-C database idle. Then, that same 5GB database under sustained HammerDB TPC-C load. Six force-deletes total, six successful automatic failovers. I’ll walk through the error log from the promoted replica, the operator’s detection and recovery behavior, and the full timing data.

When building the sql-on-k8s-operator, I wanted to make sure it could handle both planned and unplanned failovers. The easy case is a planned failover, where you deliberately move the primary role to another replica. The harder case is an unplanned failover, where the primary pod just disappears. The operator needs to handle both.

I recently ran a full planned failover rotation on a three-replica SQL Server Availability Group managed by sql-on-k8s-operator, and I want to show you exactly what happens inside SQL Server and the operator during each hop. If you’ve been following my Introducing the SQL Server on Kubernetes Operator post, this is the logical next step: what does the error log actually look like during a planned failover, what does the operator do in response, and how long does the whole thing take?

I’ve been doing a deep dive into SQL Server on-disk structures lately, and one of my favorite rabbit holes is revisiting Paul Randal’s series on file header pages. If you haven’t read it, go do that now. It covers what file header pages are, what they contain, and what happens when they corrupt. This post takes that concept and runs with it. I’ll use DBCC FILEHEADER to read the file header of every user database file on a server and answer a question that comes up more than you’d think: can you determine which files belong together as a database purely from the file header, without querying sys.databases?

Are you considering replatforming your SQL Server workload due to recent vendor changes, but still need high availability and disaster recovery? You’re not alone. One of the challenges with running SQL Server on Kubernetes is that there’s no Kubernetes operator available. That means no automated lifecycle management, no automatic failover, and no standard way to bootstrap an Always On Availability Group on Kubernetes.

I’m excited to share it today as an open-source project: sql-on-k8s-operator. Let’s go.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been following Microsoft’s announcement about native NVMe support in Windows Server 2025 with great interest. While it’s limited to local drives, how about we break that rule and leverage our virtualization layer extend NVMe benefits throughout the entire storage stack, even to remote storage like a FlashArray? I decided to test that scenario, and the results are awesome. In this post, you will learn how to make your SQL Server workload about 25% faster without changing any code in your application. Let’s go.

In my previous post, I showed you how to build a snapshot backup catalog using SQL Server 2025’s new native REST API integration. But what if you’re still running SQL Server 2022? Should you miss out on this powerful capability that SQL Server and Pure Storage provide? Absolutely not.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to build the same snapshot backup catalog functionality using PowerShell with SQL Server 2022’s T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature. While we don’t have the native REST integration yet, we can still leverage the power of FlashArray’s Protection Group Tags to build a queryable snapshot catalog that bridges the gap between database administration and storage management.

Update for SQL Server 2025:
This post and the GitHub repo have been updated for SQL Server 2025 RC1 and Ubuntu 24.04.
New in SQL Server 2025: You no longer need to install the PolyBase service to interact with Parquet files in S3. Previously, with SQL Server 2022, you had to build a custom container or manually install PolyBase. Now, S3 object integration and Parquet support work out-of-the-box!

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In this blog post, I’ve implemented two example environments for using SQL Server’s S3 object integration. One for backup and restore to S3-compatible object storage and the other for data virtualization using PolyBase connectivity to S3-compatible object storage. This work aims to get you up and running as quickly as possible to work with these new features. I implemented this in Docker Compose since that handles all the implementation and configuration steps for you. The complete code for this is available on my GitHub repo. I’m walking you through the implementation here in this post.