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PSA: Check Your Backups

This post comes to you from the Spanish countryside. I travel a lot these days, sometimes even for work. The best part about travelling, apart from food, is knowing that my backups are in good… 

Do you need access to Production?

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During a recent client meeting about a database migration, I realised that I have never logged into a SQL Server on their production environment. My involvement has been strictly dealing with setting up the new… 

The Transaction Log Is Very Resilient

Last week I wondered whether a log backup chain would survive a database migration. Unsurprisingly, the answer is “yes”. I also asked if a log backup taken on the new instance would be usable on… 

The Resilience of the Log Backup Chain

Much has been written about the log backup chain in SQL Server, where we are able to restore a database to a point in time using a combination of full, differential and transaction log backups. This… 

Career Limiting Moves – Reply All

In a recent episode of a Netflix show called Grace & Frankie, a vitriolic and profanity-ridden email with very damaging statements was accidentally sent to a mailing list. Fortunately for the characters involved, Siri auto-corrected… 

Career Limiting Moves – Assigning Blame

I worked for a vendor implementation partner in the early part of my career, and oftentimes that meant having to set up a training lab, from unpacking rented PCs and plugging them in to getting… 

Career Limiting Moves – Dropping a Table

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In this new series, I will share some things that took place early in my career that could have resulted in my looking for new work—but didn’t! This post is also evidence that I haven’t… 

Saving Time By Splitting Files for a Backup

During a recent engagement with a client transferring large files from on premises to Azure Storage, we discovered that files over a certain size are automatically throttled, causing file uploads to take much longer than expected.… 

Expiration Date on Database Backups

What does the expiration date mean on SQL Server database backups? In SQL Server Management Studio, there’s an option in the Back Up Database wizard which explicitly provides an option for “Backup set will expire”.… 

On Best Practices

We hear a lot about “best practice”, but what does it mean in the context of SQL Server? Wikipedia describes best practice as follows: A best practice is a method or technique that has been… 

Compressed and Encrypted Backups on the Cheap

We back up our databases regularly. We store them on a secure network location so that if the database drive fails, we can still satisfy the requirements for a rapid disaster recovery time (RTO, or… 

Cumulative Updates Are First Class

Since 27 January 2016, Microsoft recommends that Cumulative Updates be installed with the same confidence as Service Packs, and installed as they become available. The official announcement was posted on 24 March 2016 (their emphasis):…