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Category: T-SQL Tuesday

Thinking About Backups

Published 2016-12-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rob 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.

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Growing New Speakers

Published 2016-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday and it was a huge success:

Welcome to this month’s T-SQL Tuesday Round-Up! A few weeks ago, I sent out a call for bloggers and must say that I’m utterly blown away by the response. A whopping FORTY bloggers responded last week with contributions for Growing New Speakers!  Four – zero!  You people are all amazing!!!

There’s a lot to read here.  If you’ve ever thought about speaking, give it a try; there are 40 people trying to convince you this month.

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Growing Speakers

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun wants to plant speaker seeds:

This month’s topic is going to be about Speaking & Presenting with a focus on Helping New Speakers! 4 short years ago, I attended my very first PASS Summit and never did I think I’d ever dare to become a Speaker and present. But a year later, I got coerced into a lightning talk. Since then, I’ve presented at several dozen User Groups & SQL Saturdays. Tomorrow, I have the honor of presenting at PASS Summit 2016! And what an adventure it’s been!

For T-SQL Tuesday, I am giving differing topics if you are currently a Speaker or have never have spoken. And if you’ve never spoken, this T-SQL Tuesday comes with a challenge and a twist.

I think this is a wonderful idea.

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T-SQL Tuesday #83 Roundup

Published 2016-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon handles T-SQL Tuesday duties this month:

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I asked people to blog about the same old problems we’ve been dealing with for years. There were some great posts, including a batch of first-time contributors. You’ll notice some overlapping themes as you read through these responses–I think those themes represent some of the biggest, most important problems we have (like being able to restore backups). Thanks for everyone who contributed this month!

This was an interesting one with quite a few contributors.

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Foresight

Published 2016-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Anders Pedersen shares an easily-avoidable tale of woe:

ETL.  Spec said only Address Line 1 is needed to be loaded, so the developers only bring that line in (plus name, city etc.).  Fast forward 8 years, I get a request on my desk: “Please add Address Line 2 to import, and all tables.  Oh, and we need historical data for previously loaded files.  And for all address types”.

Groan.
No normalization in this database (which is just one of about 40 databases with SIMILAR structure, but not identical).

Read on for the damage done, as well as another example of foresight saving the day.

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Review Your Process

Published 2016-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris 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.

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SSMS Grids

Published 2016-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Riley Major airs grievances with SQL Server Management Studio’s old-timey grids:

After years of using SQL Server Management Studio (and its predecessor Query Analyzer), I’m struck by how incapable the results grids still are. Unlike Excel, you can’t sort them, you can’t filter them, you can’t search within them, and you can’t easily change their font size. In any commercial software product, grid tools are table stakes. For some reason vendors still like to run through them, but they’re never a differentiator. That’s because you can just buy a grid component and use it in your application. Even the basic grid control which came with .NET 2.0could sort.

Click through to read more, and also check out the Trello board that Riley mentions.

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(Re-)Design For Today’s Needs

Published 2016-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy sees common problems when dealing with brownfield applications:

The primary system I deal with on a daily basis was originally developed as a DOS application and several of the above examples are drawn from it. Looking at the core tables and columns, it’s easy to identify those that began life in those early days – they all have 8-character names. Time moved on and the system grew and evolved. DOS to Windows. Windows to the web. But the database, and the practices and patterns used in the database, haven’t come along for the ride.

Data schema conversions can be hard and disruptive – you need to update your application, your stored procedures, and provide customers/users with a clean migration path. Code changes require testing. Complexity and cost grows every time you introduce changes. I get that.

There’s a lot of effort in Andy’s advice, but it’s well worth it.

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Test Restores

Published 2016-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones implores you to test those database backups by restoring them somewhere:

What do you do? Hopefully you recognize the issue and can fix the issue. Maybe more importantly, you have a backup of the missing certificate.

Most people don’t deal with encryption, but you never know when your backup job might start failing, perhaps writing to a damaged file that appears to work (if you write as a device) but really isn’t capturing the backup file. Perhaps you don’t know that your backups are being written to a location and deleted a day later, but the process that is supposed to copy them to tape or a remote file share is broken.

Any number of things can happen. The point is that you want to be sure that you are actually getting useable backup files.

That means testing restores.

Read the whole thing.

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