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…
Tag: Disaster Recovery
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?.
Checklist: DR Plan Sanity Check
If a disaster struck tomorrow, are you ready for it? Are you sure you thought of everything? I cannot count the number of times something happened, and I thought that I should have been able to anticipate that. It can be a big benefit to get another viewpoint on your disaster plan. No matter how…
31 Days of Disaster Recovery Revisited
A few years ago, I did a blog post series dedicated to disaster recovery (backups, restores, corruption, etc). 31 blog posts dedicated to the topic (though not 31 days in a row) have been compiled into a 75 page eBook that can be downloaded from the new website SQL Server Best Practices. Reposted with permission…
SQL Server on Linux Series: Backing up over the network
One of the challenges with any SQL Server business continuity strategy is backing up your databases and logs on a frequent basis. With Windows, we’ve known how to accomplish this for years. But, with SQL Server on Linux, you can accomplish the same task with just a few different twists. It is similar to mounting…
Your Service Level Agreement is a Disaster
As a DBA, you’re in charge of keeping the systems healthy, and getting them back up and running quickly in the event of an emergency. This is perfectly right and proper, right up until you start defining a service level agreement. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) defines the level of service you agree to provide,…
Why shouldn’t I shrink my database log file?
TL;DR: It’s pretty pointless and can cause performance issues. Let’s start by asking why you might want to shrink your log. It’s too big I find that people who say this frequently don’t have a firm idea of what is too big or even why it might be as big as it is. This also…