User profile for Mark R

No, the clone will always need access to the image in order to function. Most database reads will go straight to the image, which is what enables SQL Clone to create clones quickly and save local storage space. In our FAQs, we have a section "Can you use SQL Clone remotely?". If there's anything you think we should do to make that easier to find, please let us know! / comments

No, the clone will always need access to the image in order to function. Most database reads will go straight to the image, which is what enables SQL Clone to create clones quickly and save local s...

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Unofortunately SQL Clone doesn't handle this situation well currently - it's definitely something we want to improve! As a workaround, for clones on machines that no longer exist, you can manually set the DeletedOn column on the Clones table in SQL Clone's database. Don't actually delete any rows from the database - this will likely cause problems in the future by breaking referential integrity. If you'd be willing to talk to us to help us understand how we can best solve this going forwards, that would really be helpful for us - I'll DM you an email address you can contact us on if you're interested! / comments

Unofortunately SQL Clone doesn't handle this situation well currently - it's definitely something we want to improve! As a workaround, for clones on machines that no longer exist, you can manually ...

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Thanks, that's helped me understand the situation. A quick fix that would work with the current release would be to add an entry in the hosts file on the machines you're going to install the agent on that points the server URL to the gatway IP. We could easily add a command line option to the installer to override the server URL - would that be an acceptable solution for you? / comments

Thanks, that's helped me understand the situation. A quick fix that would work with the current release would be to add an entry in the hosts file on the machines you're going to install the agent ...

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All the connections between the server and the agent are outgoing TCP/HTTPS connections from the agent to the server on port 14146. Is that enough for you to set up port forwarding to get it working? / comments

All the connections between the server and the agent are outgoing TCP/HTTPS connections from the agent to the server on port 14146. Is that enough for you to set up port forwarding to get it working?

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Thanks for the feedback! Are there any situations other than explicitly testing failover when cloning into a SQL Server Cluster would be useful in development or staging? / comments

Thanks for the feedback! Are there any situations other than explicitly testing failover when cloning into a SQL Server Cluster would be useful in development or staging?

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Hi - had SQL Clone been working before you encountered this error? / comments

Hi - had SQL Clone been working before you encountered this error?

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Yes - a SQL Clone functions just as a normal database. / comments

Yes - a SQL Clone functions just as a normal database.

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Erik.HT wrote: How does SQL Clone handle cloning a database that has multiple filegroups spread across different drives? You can create an image from a database with filegroups across different drives, they will all be copied to the image. An image is a single file, though, so the image itself can only be stored on a single drive. Erik.HT wrote: How large, typically, would the differencing disk need to be if adding a column to a table with 1 million records? (Obviously, I understand this will "depend" on various factors, just trying to figure out what actually gets written to the differencing disk) Would it essentially have to rewrite the entire table to the differencing disk? When updating a row, does it need to write the entire row to the disk, or just the changed column? The differencing disk contains any pages that SQL Server has written to. If SQL Server has to rewrite the table, or an entire row, then that will be stored in the differencing disk. Erik.HT wrote: What kind of performance penalty can we expect from the use of differencing disks? I'm not talking about running production with it, but more how will it affect testing performance. I don't think the differencing disks themselves impose any significant performance penalty - the main thing will be the underlying storage & network. If your storage & network setup for the images is similar to production, then I would expect the performance to be similar. If significant changes are made to the clone (such as adding a column to a large table, as you mention above), then the situation will get more complicated. Erik.HT wrote: Thanks. I guess i'm a bit confused as to how SQL Clone saves "99%" of the disk space if you need 100% for the image. I get the other benefits, but it seems like this is just over stated. Yeah, if you're going to make 100 clones from the same image, sure, it saves a lot of disk space. But if you are making one.. not so much. That's fair - if you're only ever creating a single clone, then you don't save disk space overall. Although, if you have space on a network share for an image, but not on a local machine you want to clone to, then SQL Clone could still be advantageous from a disk space point of view by changing where the data is stored. / comments

Erik.HT wrote: How does SQL Clone handle cloning a database that has multiple filegroups spread across different drives? You can create an image from a database with filegroups across diffe...

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Thanks for the suggestions! We'd love to talk to you more about this - if you're willing, could you email us on sqlclonefeedback@red-gate.com so we could set up a call? / comments

Thanks for the suggestions! We'd love to talk to you more about this - if you're willing, could you email us on sqlclonefeedback@red-gate.com so we could set up a call?

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Hi, you connect to a clone in the same way you would connect to any other database. / comments

Hi, you connect to a clone in the same way you would connect to any other database.

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Mark R

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