A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Arun 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 closedRaul Gonzalez explains the importance of filegroups in minimizing RTO:
So if we don’t create additional filegroup[s] in our databases not only all the data will go to the same logical container but also in case we have to restore that database from a backup, we will have to wait until all of it it’s restored.
Imagine you have a lot of historical data for instance and there is a disaster, if you had different filegroups, one for current data and another for the historical, you would be able to get your live data first and quickly (to get you up and running), and then restore all the historical which is not critical.
To show you how, I’m going to create a database with different filegroups so you’ll see how we can do.
Click through for the scripts, as well as more information.
Comments closedI have a post on restoring a database in Azure SQL Database:
You will need to select your restore point as well. In this case, I decided to restore back to midnight UTC on a particular date. Note that the dates are UTC rather than your local timezone!
After selecting your restore point, you pick the target server and can decide a couple of things. First, you can put this database into an elastic database pool, which makes cross-database connections a lot easier. Second, you can choose a different pricing tier. Because I only needed this database for a few minutes, keeping it at P2 Premium was fine; the total restore time meant that we spent less than a dollar bringing the data back to its pristine condition.
Be aware of the time for restoration; it can be very slow.
Comments closedChris Sommer wants you to think about why you follow certain processes:
We’re still dealing with the same problems because we’re dealing with the problems in the same way.
I think it can be cultural and can propagate from the senior level DBA’s right on down to the new hires. Sometimes it’s just lack of knowledge or understanding. Sometimes it’s just pure laziness to not want to do a deep dive and find a better solution to a recurring problem.
Here is a pretty extreme example but I think it portrays all of these.
Given some of the things I’ve seen, I’d say his example is not at all extreme.
Comments closed