Data folks talk a lot about uptime and “five nines”…a goal which means that 99.999% of the time, the system must be up. The issue is that many companies don’t bother to define what downtime means to them, and what downtime-causing threats are. Register for “Learn SQL Server: Uptime”,
Category: Disaster Recovery
Audit Database Offline Events
Knowing when an event occurred within the database environment is a very important thing. Being able to act quickly when certain events occur is equally as important. Sometimes, we may not find out about an event for a few days or weeks and then we are asked to figure out the who, when, why and…
Blogging and coding best practices
I had a discussion a while back, I think it was with Grant Fritchey (b/t) but I just can’t remember. And it wasn’t really a discussion, it was reading a blog and passing back and forth a couple of comments. Regardless. What we talked about was using best practices when coding. Not using *, formatting,…
Debugging techniques (focusing on T-SQL)
tl;dr; Add PRINT and/or SELECT statements. Comment/uncomment out pieces of code to isolate problems. Change INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements to SELECTs. Disclaimer: These are techniques I use all the time. There are almost certainly others. Use what you find works best for you. Debugging stored procedures, functions, even views is something I end up doing quite a…
What’s the difference between Files and Filegroups?
tl;dr; Filegroups are a logical construct used to separate tables and indexes from each other, files are the physical construct used to store information (log & data) about the database. When creating a database you’ll notice that each database is built of several components. There are two files, one for data and one for the…
5 Tips for Friday: Database Corruption
This week’s 5 tips will be on a topic very near to my heart, database corruption. I want to do the 5 tips a little differently this time. The tips will not just be 5 tips in no particular order. These tips will be tips as well as steps on what to do starting with…
Closing all of the connections to a database
Doing a database restore may not be the most common task a database professional will ever do, but it’s a lot more frequent than you might think. Operational restores are not exactly uncommon for example. Now, when you are doing a recovery like this, what is common is that there are people in the database.…
5 Tips for Friday: Transaction Log
For this week’s 5 Tips for Friday, I want to talk about some best practices for the transaction log. The transaction log in SQL Server is a critical component of a database, and it can affect performance and recoverability of the database. It warrants special care and maintenance. Back it up often: The goal with…
PASS Summit 2017 Precon – Virtual SQL Servers: Right to Ludicrous Speed
PASS has continues to ramp up the plans for the PASS Summit in Seattle this October, and my precon session, “Virtual SQL Servers – Right to Ludicrous Speed” has a few open slots for this Tuesday session. This topic is near and dear to my heart, and I’m thrilled to be able to present to the…
Quiz: How well do you know Recovery best practices?
Check out our new quiz. Quiz #2: How well do you know Recovery best practices? In case you missed it, our first quiz can be found here: Quiz: How well do you know SQL Server configuration best practices?.