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Scaling for Extreme Growth? The Data Layer is Ground Zero! [On-demand Webinar]

To make good decisions you need good data.  Currently 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day, and the amount of data will continue to increase exponentially as the digital economy matures. But it’s not enough to have data — it needs to be data that you can get and process in real-time that is most valuable for today’s digital apps and services. IDC's “Data Age 2025” whitepaper, predicts that nearly 30% of the global datasphere will be real-time by 2025.

The challenge, irrespective of how big or small your company might be, is scale. Scaling for extreme growth — moving from tens-to-hundreds of terabytes to petabytes is both an art and science. 

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How to Monitor IDENTITY Columns to Prevent Unplanned Downtime

We all try hard to plan for data growth and changing workloads as we build and adapt our SQL Server systems and to anticipate potential problems. Some issues, however, take a long time to appear. They lay in wait, unnoticed but not dormant, and if they strike without warning, they can cause severe disruption and extended downtime.

In November 2018, Basecamp, a software as a service provider, was caught off guard when one of their events tables ran out of IDENTITY values. It put their service into read-only mode for almost 5 hours. If you detect this looming problem early enough, you’ll have the time you need to plan and implement a cure, such as changing the datatype of the IDENTITY column from an INT to a BIGINT, as described by Danny Kruge in his Simple-Talk article. However, this can take time and planning, and may also require a scheduled maintenance window.