How to Overcome Upgrade Challenges for SQL Server 2012/2014
Imagine getting maximum value from your SQL Server 2012/2014 upgrade – quickly, easily and cost-effectively – without changing a single thing for your critical business applications.
Using database traffic management software, you can start benefitting right now from SQL Server 2012/2014’s distributed capabilities – without any of the upgrade hassle. By eliminating the need to make any modifications at the application or database layers, you can save hundreds of application development hours and speed return on investment (ROI).
Organizations face several challenges in upgrading to SQL Server 2012/2014, including:
- Load balancing and read/write split
- Replication-aware load balancing
- Lack of visibility and control at a cluster level
- Downtime and failover
Many of these challenges arise because they require you to make application changes. They often depend on knowledge of the state of the entire AlwaysOn cluster – which is difficult to program into typical application level code.
How does database traffic management software overcome these challenges? Here’s a quick look:
Load balancing and read/write split
As a transparent, intermediary layer – sitting between the application and the database – database traffic management software lets you load balance traffic across multiple servers without application modification. It understands SQL syntax for conventional SQL queries to classify them as read or write queries.
With this information at hand, database traffic management software can automatically split and load balance the SQL traffic between the primary and secondary servers. This automated load distribution and read/write split helps direct the traffic flow, steering queries to where they can be addressed most quickly, letting you:
- Ensure the second server also gets utilized
- Remove the need for app modification
- Reduce time to launch new apps to leverage SQL Server 2012/2014’s advanced features
Replication-aware load balancing
By integrating replication monitoring with load balancing and SQL flow control, database traffic management software lets you easily specify a maximum replication delay threshold – without having to modify any applications. This means that you can, for example, easily configure the database traffic management software to not send reads to any secondary server that is more than one second behind the primary. Your data remains consistent even when supporting reads from secondary servers.
Lack of visibility and control at cluster level
SQL Server’s historic lack of an extensive diagnostics and real-time visibility component becomes compounded in 2012/2014’s multi-server environment. Database traffic management software provides complete analytics of 100% of SQL traffic – giving you 360-degree real-time visibility across all servers. You can solve problems with real-time, actionable analytics. With this holistic view of traffic, you can also quickly implement features such as caching query results of repetitive queries, offloading the database server.
Downtime and failover
SQL Server 2012/2014 limits automated failover to servers sitting within a single data center, despite having the ability to scale beyond a single datacenter and limiting the architectural advantages of operating within a distributed environment.
With database traffic management software, you can replace the VNN as the primary destination of SQL connections. This enables you to use the software to provide true read/write split, load balancing, and automated cluster discovery and failover across data centers to your application stack. Database traffic management software can also considerably reduce the time for failover by automating many of the steps – reducing application errors that often result during failover.
Want to learn more?
ScaleArc invites you to attend our upcoming live webinar: ‘The Top 5 Challenges Upgrading to SQL Server 2012/2014 – And How to Overcome Them!’ Wednesday, April 30 at 11:00 a.m. PDT.
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