Back in April Steve Jones wrote up a disaster at work. Andy had one this week and wrote up the story too. Copy cat! Pretty soon everyone will be having a disaster and writing a story about it! Give these guys credit for letting you see what happens when it ALL goes bad. Disaster recovery is hard to sell and hard to do, reading the article might give you an idea that will save you some time and/or data one day.   Read more...

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The need to archive data is becoming more and more important as data sizes grow. However when you choose to archive data, you might need to reconsider how your DR plan is structured.  Read more...

Many articles on database administration take the perspective of trying to help you do your job better. We thought we might take a different tack and poke a little fun at some of more egregious mistakes we've seen over the years at IT shops.   Read more...

We discovered a need to compress our backups so that we could copy the files over the network to the DR location (log shipping), to save on transfer time during emergency restores.   Read more...

Are tape systems obsolete? A recent incident has Steve Jones thinking perhaps not.  Read more...

Are tape systems obsolete? A recent incident has Steve Jones thinking perhaps not.  Read more...

Are tape systems obsolete? A recent incident has Steve Jones thinking perhaps not.  Read more...

Are tape systems obsolete? A recent incident has Steve Jones thinking perhaps not.  Read more...

Learn how executing frequent backups and maintaining healthy transaction logs in SQL Server leads to quick recovery. Failing to do so can mean having to re-enter a lot of data.   Read more...

The CLR has not been well-received and most people use it for Regular Expressions and string functions. Here is an example that goes beyond trivial uses.  Read more...

SQL Server has a great backup and recovery architecture, but you have to know how to properly configure and use the server to ensure that you will not be seeking new employment anytime soon. A few of the Sonasoft team have written this short piece on strategies for setting up your backup jobs to ensure recovery in the event of a disaster. Welcome new authors Bilal Ahmed, Kiran Kumar, and Vas Srinivasan.   Read more...

This articles makes the case for using SQL LiteSpeed over other backup solutions and presents some notes about why the DBA should manage backups rather than offloading to network administration.   Read more...

Andy had a semi-disaster similar to the one he wrote about last year. Interesting to see the kinds of problems that happen to other people. This article raises some interesting points that are outside the scope of basic disaster recovery, looking at how/when to move databases to a different server and how to reduce the server load dynamically.   Read more...

This article analyzes the various options available for your backup and recovery process with SQL Server 2000 as well as an enhancement to your SQL Server backup and recovery process using a highly efficient backup and restore utility that provides significant time and disk space savings called SQL LiteSpeed.   Read more...

Are you tired of manually restoring each database on a new server when the original server has a melt down? Does the manual process seem slow, and prone to keystoke and mouse click errors? Would you like to have those restore scripts automatically built, so you only have to fire them off? Well this article will show you one possible method for speeding up and reducing errors will trying to perform a restore of all databases on a server.   Read more...

A VBscript class is created that can be used to query the maintenance plans on an SQL server to determine when a backup has occurred. This class can be used with others to create a scripted method for monitoring backups.   Read more...

Back in April Steve Jones wrote up a disaster at work. Andy had one this week and wrote up the story too. Copy cat! Pretty soon everyone will be having a disaster and writing a story about it! Give these guys credit for letting you see what happens when it ALL goes bad. Disaster recovery is hard to sell and hard to do, reading the article might give you an idea that will save you some time and/or data one day.   Read more...