AlwaysOn for High Number of Databases?

  • Hi All,

    Is it feasible to setup Availability Group(s) for 8,000+ databases, assuming high-end HW and huge network bandwidth are in place?

    The number of transactions per day is high but not very high, and only ~%30 of the databases are being accessed daily base.

    Thanks,

    K.

  • That's going to be well outside anything that Microsoft has tested (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff878487.aspx) and probably wouldn't be supported by Microsoft. And given the limited number of threads for data movement, etc. probably isn't the best idea. Even with only 2400 databases in use daily that's still well outside the documented and tested numbers.

    If you are going to make this work you'll probably need to consider having a decent sized consulting budget handy so that when things go wrong you've got budget to bring in people to help clean it up.

    (Disclaimer: I'm a consultant.)

  • I will disagree with Denny on one very small point. I think you should bring in the consultant now, not later.


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  • Kuzey (8/22/2013)


    Hi All,

    Is it feasible to setup Availability Group(s) for 8,000+ databases, assuming high-end HW and huge network bandwidth are in place?

    The number of transactions per day is high but not very high, and only ~%30 of the databases are being accessed daily base.

    Thanks,

    K.

    You don't have a chance of being successful with this, for the worker-pool usage if nothing else (but there are more issues to I believe):

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2012/05/17/alwayson-hadron-learning-series-worker-pool-usage-for-hadron-enabled-databases.aspx

    And as stackoverflow found, even a simple setup can be quite taxing and problematic: http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2012/09/microsoft-sql-server-alwayson-ags-at-stackoverflow/

    Remember, AG and readable secondaries is both NEW and COMPLEX, and that isn't a recipe for success.

    BTW, do you really have 8000+ databases on a single server? Kudos to you if so. I have had the record (to my knowledge) for some time now with just over 7400 databases on a single server. And this was 5+ years ago when hardware was much less capable than it is now. 🙂 I had to build a custom-made log shipping system because built in stuff just rolled over on all the metadata! Every third party tool in existence at the time barfed too. Thankfully I could use SSMS to manage the server (mostly)!

    Best,
    Kevin G. Boles
    SQL Server Consultant
    SQL MVP 2007-2012
    TheSQLGuru on googles mail service

  • Message taken 🙂

    Thanks to you all.

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