In the early days of virtualization, the core focus of virtualization was primarily consolidation. You could achieve quite high consolidation ratios, with some even as great as 20 to 1. This consolidation worked great for applications like file and print servers, development workloads, or other very lightly used servers. The virtualized servers that hold these…
Year: 2012
Automated Backup Tuning
Tuning your backups is a wonderful thing. You could easily reduce the time it takes to backup your databases by 50% of more just by changing a few settings, and yet so few people do it. I asked myself the question why and came up with two answers. People do not know how to tune…
DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists
Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company…
Is Technical Writing Important?
Many Colleges and Universities now offer certificates in technical writing. As a DBA the idea of technical writing important to me (and after all I do have a blog to maintain). Technical writing can have quite a lot of scope though. It can encompass: Writing instruction manuals Building reports Creating graphs and charts Web layout…
Shrink That Database…Seriously?
Yesterday afternoon my storage administrator came to me and asked me to look at his Enterprise Vault database and make sure that they were receiving the proper maintenance because he was running a routine over the weekend to remove some e-mails that had exceeded their retention period and it was painfully slow. He was only…
Corruption and Verifying Backups
This morning I had a conversation with a Subject Matter Expert and Application Administrator who asked me quite simply for a verified backup before he does an install on Saturday. My response was that I could test it manually for them and I was willing to do so but currently with our infrastructure the nightly…
DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups
This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a…
Fun With Recruiters
I love it when I get those special kinds of emails from recruitment agencies who claim they have the perfect position. I got one of those kinds of emails last week, I thought I would share it (as well as my response). Title: Front End Web Development Lead Position Type: Direct Placement Location: Bothell, WA,…
DBA Best Practices: A Blog Series
Introduction After the success of the “Demystifying DBA Best Practices” Pre-Conference that my good friend Robert Davis, a.k.a. SQLSoldier [Blog|Twitter] and I delivered at multiple events, including the PASS Summit 2012, I have decided to blog about some of the topics discussed at the Pre-Con. My thanks go
Do You Trust Your Application Admins?
I was sitting at my desk, happily minding my own business when an alert came through that a database backup had failed. Ok, backups fail, I just figured one of the transaction log backups hiccupped (we’ve been having some problems the last few days). When I looked at the failure it was a backup trying…