On behalf of every database administrator everywhere, I implore you not to run CHKDSK on a system that has a live database installed and running. This includes, but is not limited to: SQL Server PostgreSQL…
Over the weekend I watched — for the first time in my life — an episode of the long-running ABC and NBC police show Columbo, starring Peter Falk. I originally knew him from the film…
I am still amused by terminology in the Information Technology field. Words like “Kubernetes,” “containers,” and the BASIC keywords PEEK and POKE, all bring a smile to my lips every time I read or say…
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…
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…
This is more for my benefit in the future, but hopefully it can help someone else too. We recently had problems with a development server not installing Windows Updates. The fix was to repair the…
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…
Steve Stedman has been running a contest over on his site, the Database Corruption Challenge, which I discovered last week quite by chance through Twitter. Not to brag, but I’ve been the fastest to solve…