How I tackle disaster recovery
One of my special interests as an autistic person is understanding mechanical components of a computer, both analog and digital. In the olden days, we had devices known as hard drives which used one or…
T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #012: Why DBA skills are necessary
This is my ongoing series of answering T-SQL Tuesday posts far too late to be of any use. Click here if you want to read previous entries. Paul Randal asked us in November 2010 why…
Picking up the pieces after the DBA has left: taking ownership of a SQL Server instance
WARNING: This post contains information that can get you fired if you use it without express written permission. In some jurisdictions it might get you jail time as well. Let’s assume you are a consultant,…
On the continuity of business
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…
How to read documentation
I was thinking about a comment I made to my intern last week. She has been studiously attending to all the different things I do in my day (what many people consider a well-guarded secret!),…
Accelerated Database Recovery in SQL Server 2019: Choose your own filegroup for the version store
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…
SQL Server on Linux – feature change in Pacemaker 1.1.18
Heads up for SQL Server on Linux folks using availability groups and Pacemaker. Pacemaker 1.1.18 has been out for a while now, but it’s worth mentioning that there was a behaviour change in how it…
AzCopy finally gets a sync option, and all the world rejoices
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…
Some databases may show a NULL collation in the sys.databases DMV
While working on my Swart’s Ten Percent Rule post last week, I needed to test the Windows version of the script on my SQL Server 2016 instance. Just before removing all the databases, I noticed…
Public Service Announcement: check your backup notifications
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…
Speaking at SQLSaturday 725 in Victoria
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…
SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out
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…
The perils of RAID
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…
This is how I recovered from a catastrophic failure
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…
What is a good Disaster Recovery Plan?
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…