SQL instances shouldn’t do this So far, no one has found exercise to be beneficial to servers. Purposeless repetitive motion may be good for human muscles, but your SQL Server instance experiences no gain for the pain. Here’s a good example: taking useless backups. (“Did she say useless backups? I’ve never heard
Tag: Disaster Recovery
SQL maintenance is a lifecycle, not an event!
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
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.
What is COPY_ONLY?
You’ll frequently hear that you should add the COPY_ONLY clause when taking an ad-hoc full backup to avoid messing up the backup chain. Just in case you haven’t: You should add the COPY_ONLY clause when taking an ad-hoc full backup to avoid messing up the backup chain. But you may be asking why? What exactly…
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
DBA: Guardian of the Data
I was asked recently by Idera to take a look at the things that could cost a DBA their job. This has lead to a new whitepaper I wrote about the 5 mistakes that DBAs make that can cost them their jobs. Watch Idera’s Resource Central or follow @Idera_Software on Twitter to see when the…
Who Owns SQL Backups?
I was asked by Idera to take a look at the things that could cost a DBA their job. This has lead to a new whitepaper I wrote about the 5 mistakes that DBAs make that can cost them their jobs. Watch Idera’s Resource Central or follow @Idera_Software on Twitter to see when the whitepaper…
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…
Generic Database Restores
The other day I found myself in the position of needing to restore multiple databases to a server. In this case all the log files would be on one drive and all the data files on another. Rather than sit there and write restore scripts for ~20 databases I figured it would be quicker to…