Thursday, September 24, 2009

What’s the best practice for starting SQL services?

An incident that occurred to us this morning causes me to rethink how I have SQL services set to start when the server is started or rebooted.

Early this morning we had a power failure at one of our data centers. It caused one SQL server to be rebooted and left another server online. But it caused the SAN controllers to reboot also. Server 1, which didn’t reboot, began reporting error 823 when it couldn’t see the databases, even after the SAN came back online. Restarting the SQL services cleared that up. Server 2, which did reboot, came up reporting no problems. Consistency checks on all databases showed no problems so luckily we were good to go.

I have the SQL services set to restart automatically when the server starts. But now I’m wondering if that is a good idea.What if the SAN wasn’t available when SQL first restarts? What if there is data corruption? Would it be better to always start the services manually so I could check the logs first, before I restart SQL?

I’m interested in hearing how you handle SQL service startups.  

No comments: