With the new 2008R2 servers that were recently built, I am hoping to institute some standard best practices on the boxes moving forward. The first one was to move the TempDB to its own drive on a separate LUN and since I have moved a TempDB before, no problems here. The second best practice was…
Your “Five Nines” Means Nothing To Me
There’s a lot of talk on High Availability. I know I’m a huge fan of it, in particular clustering (but I know it’s not for all situations and the changes that SQL 2012 with AlwaysOn Groups may mean that traditional clustering is used less and less). There are of course other HA solutions out there…
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…
The Barking Dog Analogy
A discussion started today on Twitter about CXPacket waits. There had been a heated debate on the subject on Twitter the previous night (wow, does that sound geeky), so many of us got looped into today’s discussion. Someone had experienced a problem with a delete query on a large table causing all CPUs to nearly…
Be A Courteous Blogger
Today I received an email, nothing unusual about that. This email happened to be from a SQL blogger. It’s one of those newsletter type things, it even said at the bottom that I had opted into receiving this email. The only thing is that I, at no point, signed up to receive a newsletter. In…
Hardening SQL Server
My new article for SQL Server Magazine on Hardening SQL Server has been posted online and will appear in an upcoming print issue. This article is a brief explanation of how to secure SQL Server against malicious attack or invasion. This article can serve as a guide for preventing your SQL Servers from being compromised.…
T-SQL Tuesday #19–What A Disaster
Allen Kinsel (blog|twitter) is running this months T-SQL Tuesday and wanted to know about preparing or recovering from a disaster. I thought this might be a good opportunity to tell a little story of how a disaster sucked up around three weeks of my life a couple of years ago. It was a normal day,…
Speakers Third Rule
You’ve mastered the first rule and have submitted a session to present at a SQLSaturday, local user group or at your office, excellent. Your presentation is written, all the details are there…slides, demos and you’ve got your patter. You’ve followed the second rule and the presentation is all you. What’s next? Practice makes perfect Time…
Speakers Second Rule
After writing a post for Un-SQL Friday on the first rule of speaking I decided that it would make quite a good series of posts, so here’s my second rule of speaking: Find your own voice What do I mean by this? As an analogy when I first started out blogging I tried to emulate…
Un-SQL Friday #004–Speakers First Rule
I may be a day late and a dollar short for Un-SQL Friday #004: Speaker Lessons Learned but still felt I had something to share. One of my favorite book series is The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. The first of the 11 book series is called Wizards First Rule. It’s one of those…