So that is the thought and I am going to build out a couple servers in Virtual Box and try to test this out. Should be fun and simple enough to POC this idea. I will let you know more details on the test and if it works out or not.

Hope this might help

Hope this helps.

ALTER DATABASE Your_DBNAME SET PARTNER FAILOVER

Well that is very simple but to automate it will take a bit more work. No problem though. Break out the powershell and away we go.

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:”";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

## Step one: Load SMO Assembly

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO’ ) | out-null

#Step Two: Define Variables

$failover = 0

$instances = “workdog”, “workdog\test”

##Step Three: find current database that is the principal

foreach ($instance in $instances)

{

$s = New-Object (‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server’ ) $instance

$databases = $s.Databases

#$databases | select name, mirroringstatus, status

foreach($db in $databases)

{

$name = $db.name

$mirrorstatus = $db.MirroringStatus

$mirrorstatus = $mirrorstatus.ToString()

$status = $db.Status

if(($mirrorstatus -ne “None”) -and ($Status -eq “Normal”) -and ($failover -eq 0))

{

echo “$name is on $instance”

$query = “ALTER DATABASE $name SET PARTNER FAILOVER”

$failover = 1

Invoke-Sqlcmd -serverinstance $instance -Database master -Query $query

So basically what I am doing is setting up SMO connections to my instances and looping thru all the databases. If I find a database that is mirrored and the primary then I know what instance to run the SQL Query against and I do. I also set $failover = 1 so that the script knows that if it iterates thru and finds that the second instance now has the primary do not run the failover again.

Hope this helps

I have a SQL Server that is very mission critical and if the database is not up and accessible the company is losing money. This is very important and needs to have as close to 100% uptime as possible since this application is part of a consolidation project and that means that the server is taking transactions just about 24 hours a day.

This is a server that I inherited and it seems like the vendor has had control of the environment pretty much exclusively. I have been brought in and I have made some recommendations to help improve performance and I have made some comments about HA and DR. I have made comments because the vendor is essentially using Transactional Replication as a solution for both. They do not have Primary keys in some tables so that means we do not have those tables on the replicated servers. They also are not replicating Indexes, Triggers, and Stored Procs. This would be OK if they had a system in place to script them out and apply them on the replicated database but they do not.

So, Something happened that caused kerberos to break and now we can only use sql server authentication to the instance.  We only have one SQL Server account and that account is dbo in the production database and has no other roles except public. The SA account has been disabled, and on top of that no one knows the password for it.

So to me this is a disaster. I also forgot to mention that the Agent will not start up. I do not think that a cluster would have helped us since the server/instance name for the cluster would be the same even when failed over to different hardware. So I classify this as a situation where DR needs to be in place.

What say you about what a Disaster is. I do not think it is when your entire data-center is taken out anymore. It could be just about anything and if you have not planned for it then you will pay the price as I did.

Well now I get up, I know that this instance is a production instance or I would not be getting pages at 3:00 AM. I know this because I wrote all of our monitoring scripts. (I love Powershell) So I drag out of bed and go to my computer log in and what do I see. Errors saying that the solution may be to restore MSDB from a previous backup. Well I know that I back MSDB up but I honestly have never attempted to restore MSDB. I will be doing that soon though. Anyway, I start researching and I find that usually restarting the SQL Server will repair the issue and if not then restore. Well the service was already not running so all I did was started it. Everything came up fine but I was not really convinced yet so I did a dbcc checkdb and found that all actually did seem to be well.

I then wiped the sweat off my brow and continued to look for a reason that this may have occured and why the instance shut down. I have found nothing but I have had no issue with the server from that point until now. I would really like to know what went wrong but I can not find anything in the SQL Server logs or the Windows Logs. If anyone knows where I should look I would appreciate it.

That was a good experience for me, now I really understand that I do need to back up my system databases as well as verify that I can restore them. I would also like to set up a server and start simulating Database Corruption and work on how to recover. Document it and have a plan just in case.

STARTUP NOMOUNT;

ALTER DATABASE MOUNT STANDBY DATABASE;

ALTER DATABASE RECOVER MANGED STANDBY DATABASE;

If you have enabled the primary to send archive logs then you are all set.