A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Restore-SqlBackupFromDirectory is super useful in a pinch, too, but it’s not quite fleshed out to our standards, so it doesn’t have a corresponding webpage. We expect this will be renamed by the next release.
Again, I usually have all the docs for all of our newly released commands, but I was trynna make it for #tsql2sday.
Check out her post, and then check out dbatools.
Comments closedRob Farley has a set of questions you should ask yourself regarding your backups:
Does your disaster testing include a situation where a well-meaning person has taken an extra backup, potentially spoiling differential or log backups?
Does your disaster testing include random scenarios where your team needs to figure out what’s going on and what needs to happen to get everything back?
Something which might be helpful would be to catalog the reason why you restored a particular backup (or when somebody asks you for a backup but you can’t do it), and then have a plan to handle that scenario in the future.
Comments closedDaniel Jones shows how to use backup encryption in SQL Server:
The backup encryption in SQL server is needed due to following reasons:
Way to Keep Database File Secure: Users need to encrypt SQL server database backup files because this procedure provides complete security to copy of SQL server data. This security measure will keep transaction logs, tables, and other server data safe from any person, who wants to make use of these data in wrong manner.
Accessed Only By Authorized Person: It is impossible to restore an encrypted backup file, if a person is not having certificate or asymmetric key for decryption. Therefore, it means that only authorized persons who are knowing credentials of encrypted backup file can restore data with its full access.
Encrypting backups (and storing the encryption key somewhere independent of the backups themselves) can help prevent a very bad day.
Comments closedArun Sirpal gets started on T-SQL Tuesday a little early:
Cannot find server certificate with thumbprint ‘0xC0367AC8E9AE54538C17ACB0F63070D6FF21316A’.
Msg 3013, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
RESTORE DATABASE is terminating abnormally.The dreaded cannot find server certificate with thumbprint message. Why is this happening?
Read on for the solution.
Comments closedBrent Ozar has a short test on effective RPO and RTO:
You can’t repair the corruption (it’s a clustered index, and there aren’t enough nonclustered indexes to cover all the columns), and the business needs that data back. You’re on: answer these questions:
Click through for the questions. They’re definitely worth thinking about.
Comments closedBut my Backup file is still not visible in the wizard!
Permissions. If you drill down into the folders in Linux, we found that the files already present in the /data/ folder are owned by the user mssql. Our recently copied backup file is NOT owned by mssql, and it not accessible to other users. So, our wizard cannot see the file.
The whole process is pretty straightforward.
Comments closedJens Vestergaard shows how to schedule Azure VM backups:
In this wizard we are presented with three (3) areas of configuration; First we need to decide if it’s in Azure or On-Premises. By selecting Azure, we are left with only Virtual Machine as the only option for the backup. On-Premises has more options, SQL Server, Sharepoint and Hyper-V VM’s among others. This example will be about Azure VM’s, hence we selected accordingly.
Step 2 is about the backup policy, or in other words frequency and retention. I am going with the default settings here, but options are great as you can configure retention range for weekly, monthly and yearly backups in parallel.
It’s easy and like any other backups, might save your bacon later.
Comments closedMax Trinidad walks through restoring a SQL Server database to a new Linux instance:
So, before you start working or trying to restore your Windows SQL Databases to SQL Server on Linux, there are a few things you may need to do. This will involved installing components which are not installed by default when first build your Linux System.
One thing I had to say with confidence! You WILL find all your answer on the internet. Any of the Linux Distro forum have your resolution to any of the issue you may encountered. Also, most of the time you Linux system will tell you (or gives a tip) what do with missing dependencies.
Other than that, there are Linux Application Updater solution to help keep your system up-to-date.
This is an amazing time to be in the SQL Server space.
Comments closedKevin Hill goes back to basics on backups:
Backing up SQL Server databases has been documented in thousands of books, Microsoft documentation and blog posts since the product was released in the 90s.
I’m not about to try and tell you HOW to backup your SQL databases. Rather, I want to take you through the basic considerations of deciding what to back up, when, how often, etc. in clear language that non-SQL folks can work through.
Understanding how to take and tune backups is important; this is more fundamental advice.
Comments closedRichie Rump has some nice pointers about developing for Azure or AWS:
Since we’re a bunch of data freaks, we wanted to make sure that our data and files are properly backed up. I set out to create a script that will backup DynamoDB to a file and copy the data in S3 to Azure. The reasoning for saving our backups into a different cloud provider is pretty straightforward. First, we wanted to keep the data in a separate cloud account from the application. We didn’t make the same mistakes that Code Spaces did. Secondly, I wanted to kick the tires of Azure a bit. Heck, why not?
I figure this script would take me a day to write and a morning to deploy. In the end it took four days to write and deploy. So here are some lessons that I learned the hard way from trying to bang out this backup code.
This is a must-read if you’re starting to look at using cloud providers for services.
Comments closed