I was reading a blog post from my friend Randolph West (b/t) on Best Practices and a thought struck me. Starting with Randolph’s definition of a best practice (he got it from Wikipedia and it’s more than good enough) A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to…
Tag: General BP
Q&A: Multiple SQL Server Instances on a VM
I recently received a great question through email. It was whether or not it is a good idea to have multiple SQL Server instances on a single VM. This is a fun question and I thought I’d answer it here. The answer is the ubiquitous DBA answer – “It Depends“. Both pros and cons exist…
Summon Blue Screens of Death (for testing purposes only, of course)
Today I had a need to manually trigger and sustain a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) inside a Windows Server VM. The goal was to be able to trigger a BSOD so that I could work on the detection of powered on but failed VMs inside a server environment. All major hypervisors have this feature…
You Have One Job
I’m sure most if not all of you are familiar with the meme “You had one job”. I was reminded of this meme this past Friday when I headed out to run an errand at lunch time. There were 3 guys standing in the middle lane of a busy intersection, 2 were road workers and…
Best Advice Ever: Learn By Helping Others
I remember when back in 2001 my friend and former SQL Server MVP Carlos Eduardo Rojas was busy earning his MVP street-cred in the NNTP forums, aka Newsgroups. I always thought he was playing the Sheriff trying to put some order in a Wild Wild West town by trying to understand what these people were…
DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 3 - Use a Wiki for Documentation
Retaking on this blog series after an extended hiatus. I hope you will enjoy today’s topic on documentation. Boring Work? Nope – An Opportunity One of the often neglected and yet extremely important tasks of any DBA is to document his/her environment. I can certainly relate to those of you who haven’t written a…
DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 2 - Password Lists
Digital World, Digital Locks One of the biggest digital assets that any company has is its secrets. These include passwords, key rings, certificates, and any other digital asset used to protect another asset from tampering or unauthorized access. As a DBA, you are very likely to manage some of these assets for your company…
Shrink That Database…Seriously?
Yesterday afternoon my storage administrator came to me and asked me to look at his Enterprise Vault database and make sure that they were receiving the proper maintenance because he was running a routine over the weekend to remove some e-mails that had exceeded their retention period and it was painfully slow. He was only…
Fun With Recruiters
I love it when I get those special kinds of emails from recruitment agencies who claim they have the perfect position. I got one of those kinds of emails last week, I thought I would share it (as well as my response). Title: Front End Web Development Lead Position Type: Direct Placement Location: Bothell, WA,…
DBA Best Practices: A Blog Series
Introduction After the success of the “Demystifying DBA Best Practices” Pre-Conference that my good friend Robert Davis, a.k.a. SQLSoldier [Blog|Twitter] and I delivered at multiple events, including the PASS Summit 2012, I have decided to blog about some of the topics discussed at the Pre-Con. My thanks go