The importance of backups

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 I was certainly not expecting this.

My second topic is about backing up, testing, and restoring SQL Server backups if you are not a DBA. The vast majority of data professionals I have spoken to (including me) started out as accidental DBAs, inheriting databases and having to look after them.

I’ve written about disaster recovery on several occasions on this blog, and in the book SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out; I’ve presented several times on the importance of backups, and I even wrote a tool to restore databases from Azure Storage knowing only the database name.

This session will go into details about how SQL Server writes to its respective data and log files, recovery models, and types of backups. Then I’ll go into ways to make the job of restoring a backup easy, even if you don’t understand anything about databases.

I look forward to sharing this session with you in November. If you haven’t registered yet, come on up to Seattle and learn some stuff.