What a Great Week at PASS!
Sharing how ScaleArc can augment SQL Server to dramatically improve application uptime created a lot of “lightbulb” moments – when they really got the value of our software
I was talking with a senior database developer at a large media company who’s really having a tough time with database failover. He’s got SQL Server 2012 and 2014 with AlwaysOn, for a few of his apps, and SQL Server all the way back to 2000 for some other properties.
His AlwaysOn databases support failover, but that failover is very painful because of the steps in AlwaysOn. When the primary fails, SQL Server severs all the connections into that server and into the secondary that’s getting promoted. So for this database developer, all his users see their sessions die during each failover.
He was super excited to hear that ScaleArc maintains all the client connections, plus we hold inbound queries in our queue while the failover happens. So with ScaleArc, his users would see a little delay but not hang.
A lot of conversations went like that, with people tuning into the limitations of SQL Server and understanding how ScaleArc helps.
The other “a-ha” moment came when folks realized this same failover technology enables zero-downtime maintenance. A senior DBA from a healthcare company talked about how her team runs maintenance windows now – about eight people, on Saturday evening, for any major update. The ability to do rolling updates on secondaries, without any application downtime, would mean she and the team could do weekday updates with far fewer staffers.
Three days at a show always leaves you with sore legs and hoarse throats, but these conversations were fantastic. It was such a pleasure to be talking to these deep database experts. They know their databases, their apps, their replication and failover pain. And it was inspiring to see their eyes light up at how ScaleArc can help. We look forward to seeing these folks at their local User Group meetings in the coming months.
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