A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kevin Hill has a Youtube video on the basics of backups:
You’ll want to go full screen to see what’s going on. This video is targeted at non-DBAs, but give it a watch anyway…I can take the heckling!
If you want to keep down the video path, Sean McCown had a series of user group meetings on creating backups, syntax, tuning backups, restoring backups, etc.
Comments closedAndy 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.
Comments closedRestore-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 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 closedAndy 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.
Comments closedAndy 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.
Comments closedAndy 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.
Comments closedAnders 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.
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