With entire countries shutting their borders, and people being forced to stay home and isolate themselves for as long as possible while health departments ramp up to handle this pandemic, the question of business continuity…
As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of AzCopy, especially now that it has a sync option to keep local data synchronized with blob storage. In a recent release of…
An exciting new feature in SQL Server 2019 is Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR). Resulting from a combination of magic beans and smart software developers (I might be wrong about the beans), there is a good…
I have been selected to present a second session for the PASS Summit in November this year. I wrote a few weeks ago about the Linux Learning Path and being a part of that, so…
Next month, Microsoft is ending five years of extended support on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. This follows five years of mainstream support before that. You really should be upgrading to SQL…
Time for another short blog post, and this one combines two topics I am very passionate about: security, and SQL Server performance. Let’s start by talking about “antivirus” and what that means in today’s world.…
I’m here for the small organizations, the shops that can’t afford expensive solutions to maintain their environments. I’m here for them because that’s me: the one-person consultancy. I’ve built stuff that’s useful to me, and…
I consider Blob Storage to be the gateway drug to Azure, because it’s a really easy way to get going with offsite backups. One of the ways I’ve leveraged Blob Storage is with SQL Server…
The Azure cloud platform lost a data centre for a number of hours recently due to inclement weather. This affected many customers — including Microsoft’s own services — for almost an entire day. Given that…
Shall I compare thee to Management Studio? Thou art more scriptable and consistent. Those out-of-memory errors do tend to lose hours of work. And I mean, SSMS doesn’t run from the command line. Sometimes I…
Victoria is on an island off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. The island is wisely called Vancouver Island. It is beautiful there, and I wouldn’t mind retiring there someday. Those of you who listen…
For the last five months or so, I have been helping some really smart people put words on paper, both the physical and electronic kind, which is hopefully going to culminate in an actual technical…
Recently, I was asked to assist an organization with getting their data back for a SQL Server that had experienced physical hard drive failure. I asked a lot of questions about the configuration of the…
I was fresh off the boat* from South Africa, working in a small computer store in an equally small town in Saskatchewan. Five days a week in winter, six days a week in summer, mainly…
During a Q&A session I hosted at our local Calgary SQL Server User Group last month, one of the attendees mentioned an interview question he’d had and wanted to hear my thoughts. How would you…