High availability essentials

This topic provides reference information comparing high availability and disaster recovery solutions between Microsoft SQL Server 2019 and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. You can gain insight into how these database systems handle server-level and database-level failure protection, disk error protection, read-only replicas, failover addressing, and read-only workloads.

SQL Server Usage

SQL Server provides several solutions to support high availability and disaster recovery requirements including Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCI), Always On Availability Groups, Database Mirroring, and Log Shipping. The following sections describe each solution.

SQL Server 2017 also adds new Availability Groups functionality which includes read-scale support without a cluster, Minimum Replica Commit Availability Groups setting, and Windows-Linux cross-OS migrations and testing.

SQL Server 2019 introduces support for creating Database Snapshots of databases that include memory-optimized filegroups. A database snapshot is a read-only, static view of a SQL Server database. The database snapshot is transactional consistent with the source database as of the moment of the snapshot’s creation. Among other things, some benefits of the database snapshots with regard to high availability are:

For more information about snapshots, see Database Snapshots in the SQL Server documentation.

SQL Server 2019 introduces secondary to primary connection redirection for Always On Availability Groups. It allows client application connections to be directed to the primary replica regardless of the target server specified in the connections string. The connection string can target a secondary replica. Using the right configuration of the availability group replica and the settings in the connection string, you can automatically redirect the connection to the primary replica.

For more information, see Secondary to primary replica read/write connection redirection (Always On Availability Groups) in the SQL Server documentation.

Always On Failover Cluster Instances

Always On Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) use the Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) operating system framework to deliver redundancy at the server instance level.

An FCI is an instance of SQL Server installed across two or more WSFC nodes. For client applications, the FCI is transparent and appears to be a normal instance of SQL Server running on a single server. The FCI provides failover protection by moving the services from one WSFC node Windows server to another WSFC node windows server in the event the current active node becomes unavailable or degraded.

FCIs target scenarios where a server fails due to a hardware malfunction or a software hang up. Without FCI, a significant hardware or software failure would render the service unavailable until the malfunction is corrected. With FCI, you can configure another server as a standby to replace the original server if it stops servicing requests.

For each service or cluster resource, there is only one node that actively services client requests (known as owning a resource group). A monitoring agent constantly monitors the resource owners and can transfer ownership to another node in the event of a failure or planned maintenance such as installing service packs or security patches. This process is completely transparent to the client application, which may continue to submit requests as normal when the failover or ownership transfer process completes.

FCI can significantly minimize downtime due to hardware or software general failures. The main benefits of FCI are:

For more information, see Always On Failover Cluster Instances (SQL Server) in the SQL Server documentation.

Always On Availability Groups

Always On Availability Groups is the most recent high availability and disaster recovery solution for SQL Server. It was introduced in SQL Server 2012 and supports high availability for one or more user databases. Because you can configure and manage it at the database level rather than the entire server, it provides much more control and functionality. As with FCI, Always On Availability Groups relies on the framework services of Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC) nodes.

Always On Availability Groups utilize real-time log record delivery and apply mechanism to maintain near-real-time readable copies of one or more databases. These copies can also be used as redundant copies for resource usage distribution between servers (a scale-out read solution).

The main characteristics of Always On Availability Groups are:

For more information, see Always On availability groups: a high-availability and disaster-recovery solution in the SQL Server documentation.

Database Mirroring

Microsoft recommends avoiding Database Mirroring for new development. This feature is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. It is recommended to use Always On Availability Groups instead.

Database mirroring is a legacy solution to increase database availability by supporting near instantaneous failover. It is similar in concept to Always On Availability Groups, but can only be configured for one database at a time and with only one standby replica.

For more information, see Database Mirroring (SQL Server) in the SQL Server documentation.

Log Shipping

Log shipping is one of the oldest and well tested high availability solutions. It is configured at the database level similar to Always On Availability Groups and Database Mirroring. You can use log shipping to maintain one or more secondary databases for a single primary database.

The log shipping process involves three steps:

You can configure log shipping to create multiple secondary database replicas by repeating steps 2 and 3 for each secondary server. Unlike FCI and Always On Availability Groups, log shipping solutions don’t provide automatic failover.

In the event the primary database becomes unavailable or unusable for any reason, an administrator must configure the secondary database to serve as the primary and potentially reconfigure all client applications to connect to the new database.

The main characteristics of log shipping solutions are:

For more information, see About Log Shipping (SQL Server) in the SQL Server documentation.

Examples

Configure an Always On Availability Group.

CREATE DATABASE DB1;

ALTER DATABASE DB1 SET RECOVERY FULL;

BACKUP DATABASE DB1 TO DISK = N'\\MyBackupShare\DB1\DB1.bak' WITH FORMAT;

CREATE ENDPOINT DBHA STATE=STARTED
AS TCP (LISTENER_PORT=7022) FOR DATABASE_MIRRORING (ROLE=ALL);

CREATE AVAILABILITY GROUP AG_DB1
  FOR
    DATABASE DB1
  REPLICA ON
    'SecondarySQL' WITH
      (
        ENDPOINT_URL = 'TCP://SecondarySQL.MyDomain.com:7022',
        AVAILABILITY_MODE = ASYNCHRONOUS_COMMIT,
        FAILOVER_MODE = MANUAL
      );

-- On SecondarySQL
ALTER AVAILABILITY GROUP AG_DB1 JOIN;

RESTORE DATABASE DB1 FROM DISK = N'\\MyBackupShare\DB1\DB1.bak'
WITH NORECOVERY;

-- On Primary
BACKUP LOG DB1
TO DISK = N'\\MyBackupShare\DB1\DB1_Tran.bak'
  WITH NOFORMAT

-- On SecondarySQL
RESTORE LOG DB1
  FROM DISK = N'\\MyBackupShare\DB1\DB1_Tran.bak'
  WITH NORECOVERY

ALTER DATABASE MyDb1 SET HADR AVAILABILITY GROUP = MyAG;

For more information, see Business continuity and database recovery - SQL Server in the SQL Server documentation.

PostgreSQL Usage

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition (Aurora PostgreSQL) is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) providing high availability capabilities. Amazon RDS provides database and instance administration functionality for provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection, and repair.

New Aurora PostgreSQL database instances are always created as part of a cluster. If you don’t specify replicas at creation time, a single-node cluster is created. You can add database instances to clusters later.

Regions and Availability Zones

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is hosted in multiple global locations. Each location is composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Each Region is a separate geographic area having multiple, isolated Availability Zones. Amazon RDS supports placement of resources such as database instances and data storage in multiple locations. By default, resources aren’t replicated across regions.

Each Region is completely independent and each Availability Zone is isolated from all others. However, the main benefit of Availability Zones within a Region is that they are connected through low-latency, high bandwidth local network links.

Resources may have different scopes. A resource may be global, associated with a specific region (region level), or associated with a specific Availability Zone within a region. For more information, see Resource locations in the User Guide for Linux Instances.

When you create a database instance, you can specify an availability zone or use the default No preference option. In this case, Amazon chooses the availability zone for you.

You can distribute Aurora PostgreSQL instances across multiple availability zones. You can design applications designed to take advantage of failover such that in the event of an instance in one availability zone failing, another instance in different availability zone will take over and handle requests.

You can use elastic IP addresses to abstract the failure of an instance by remapping the virtual IP address to one of the available database instances in another Availability Zone. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses in the User Guide for Linux Instances.

An Availability Zone is represented by a region code followed by a letter identifier. For example, us-east-1a.

Aurora PostgreSQL DB Cluster

A DB cluster consists of one or more DB instances and a cluster volume that manages the data for those instances. A cluster volume is a virtual database storage volume that may span multiple Availability Zones with each holding a copy of the database cluster data.

An Amazon Aurora database cluster is made up of one of more of the following types of instances:

Endpoints

Endpoints are used to connect to Aurora PostgreSQL databases. An endpoint is a Universal Resource Locator (URL) comprised of a host address and port number.

Some general considerations for using endpoints:

Amazon Aurora Storage

Aurora PostgreSQL data is stored in a cluster volume. The cluster volume is a single, virtual volume that uses fast solid-state disk (SSD) drives. The cluster volume is comprised of multiple copies of the data distributed between availability zones in a region. This configuration minimizes the chances of data loss and allows for the failover scenarios mentioned in the preceding sections.

Amazon Aurora cluster volumes automatically grow to accommodate the growth in size of your databases. An Aurora cluster volume has a maximum size of 64 terabytes (TiB). Since table size is theoretically limited to the size of the cluster volume, the maximum table size in an Aurora DB cluster is 64 TiB.

Storage Auto-Repair

The chance of data loss due to disk failure is greatly minimize due to the fact that Aurora PostgreSQL maintains multiple copies of the data in three Availability Zones. Aurora PostgreSQL detects failures in the disks that make up the cluster volume. If a disk segment fails, Aurora repairs the segment automatically. Repairs to the disk segments are made using data from the other cluster volumes to ensure correctness. This process allows Aurora to significantly minimize the potential for data loss and the subsequent need to restore a database.

Survivable Cache Warming

When a database instance starts, Aurora PostgreSQL performs a warming process for the buffer pool. Aurora PostgreSQL pre-loads the buffer pool with pages that have been frequently used in the past. This approach improves performance and shortens the natural cache filling process for the initial period when the database instance starts servicing requests. Aurora PostgreSQL maintains a separate process to manage the cache, which can stay alive even when the database process restarts. The buffer pool entries remain in memory regardless of the database restart providing the database instance with a fully warm buffer pool.

Crash Recovery

Aurora PostgreSQL can instantaneously recover from a crash and continue to serve requests. Crash recovery is performed asynchronously using parallel threads enabling the database to remain open and available immediately after a crash.

For more information, see Fault tolerance for an Aurora DB cluster in the User Guide for Aurora.

Examples

The following walkthrough demonstrates how to create a read-replica:

After the replica is created, you can run read and write operations on the primary instance and read-only operations on the replica.

Summary

For more information, see Amazon Aurora DB clusters in the User Guide for Aurora and Regions and Zones in the User Guide for Linux Instances.