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Category: T-SQL Tuesday

Restoring Multiple Differential Backups

Published 2016-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher crashes his own T-SQL Tuesday party:

This has led to the belief (or at least I believe this is one of the causes) that you can only restore a single differential backup. And up until the last few weeks I’d believed that myself. So, to set up a fairly simple test. I’m going to take a backup, create a table, and make some changes with differential backups in between the changes.

Check it out.  I don’t really see a good case for restoring multiple differentials (because each differential has the complete set of changes since the last full backup, so the differential at X+t is a proper subset of X+2t if your goal is to restore back to X+2t), but having multiple differentials, absolutely.

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Multi-Tenant Database Backups

Published 2016-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan thinks about multi-tenant databases in Azure and how you might back them up:

Backup-restore is not directly supported by standard methods in SQL Server/Azure SQL database. One possible way to backup a tenant could be to have a script, which could bcp data to text files. Restore could similarly be a script, which could bcp from txt files to tables in the destination database. Both scripts could be auto-generated from tenant metadata. If the schema for a tenant has 100 tables, the number of tables in a database in this model grows quickly, and the administrative cost of maintaining scripts and tenant metadata could be high. As a side note, no query execution plans can be reused across tenants, since table names are different.

Thinking about customers which share schema, tables, etc. but need to be handled differently requires some additional effort; pretty much all of the tools around SQL Server assume that you care about things at the table, filegroup, or database level.

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Backups To Azure

Published 2016-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon shows how to move your backups up to Azure Blob Storage:

Geographically-redundant storage, on a cool access tier currently costs about $0.02/GB. That’s a fraction of what it would cost you to have it on your NAS, let alone having multiple geographically redundant copies, and the effort to set up and maintain your copy to off-site.

And up to a certain size, it’s faster to retrieve the backups from Azure than calling the off-site storage company.

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Using DBATools For Backups And Restores

Published 2016-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire talks about the dbatools Powershell suite and its cmdlets related to backups and restorations:

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.

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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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