You’ve heard me talk about this many times, in so many different ways, but it’s worth repeating: SQL maintenance lifecycles are important. People who disagree, disagree because they spend too much time firefighting and don’t have time to really think about it. Don’t know anything about SQL maintenance lifecycles? Let’s
Category: Maintenance
Integrity Checks are Useless*
Integrity checks have become more and more important over the years, as companies store more and more data. This data is absolutely critical, so when corruption happens, it can break a company. But in all but the smallest shops, running any kind of integrity check is all but completely useless.
Managing Backup Issues in Availability Groups
A user asked me the other day how to go about managing backup issues in Availability Groups. Well, Minion Backup is fully Availability Group aware, and has innovative features that makes it a complete solution. This is one of the big reasons we coded MB: any solution for dealing with the issues
Proper Backup Alerting
When I saw the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this time I just had to get in. Maybe I’ve never mentioned it, but backups is one of my big things. Today I’d like to talk about two topics that get overlooked quite often, the “backups” to the backup, so to speak. First up: proper
Best Practicing, the Results Part I
Yesterday, I showed you how to install the Best Practices Analyzer and use it through the Baseline Configuration Analyzer. Even after your servers are setup for best practices, it is good to run the BPA from time to time to look for changes, especially if you have more than one DBA working on your servers. Here…
Best Practicing? Here’s How!
Are you trying to conform your systems to Microsoft standard best practices? Have you used Microsoft’s tools for automating this? The first item you will need is the Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer 2.0 (download). It will help you to maintain optimal system configuration by analyzing against the predefined set of best practices which we will download…
Backup and Recovery
On the drive in this morning, I was reflecting on what I needed to go over with my junior DBA today in his learning path (channeling Yoda). Backup and Recovery is so vitally important to what we do on a daily basis that I really need to drive that home to him. Therefore, I thought…
Transaction Log Fills Up the Drive….Oh No!
Maybe your users cannot access your database, or maybe your preferred monitoring software is reporting limited or non-existent disk space on your log drive for a particular SQL Server. Maybe you get a call from a Subject Matter Expert telling you their application is wigging out, or maybe you get a call from a user…
New Year House Cleaning
As I was driving in to the office today, I could not help but think of my wife’s cleaning efforts at home yesterday. She decided the holiday was a good time to remove the clutter from our kitchen cabinets and drawers. That inspired me this morning to do the same and hopefully put a smile…
Optimizing Database Restores
You can Google/Bing/AltaVista and get a lot of results for speeding up your backups. Those results will include using third-party tools, performing file and filegroup backups, differential backups and the like. Some of the more technical blogs will talk about adjusting some of the backup parameters to improve throughput. There’s really not much written (that…