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...

In this next article of the SQL Server in the Enterprise Series, we'll explore how to cluster Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 in a step-by-step manner. After this article, you should be able to cluster a SQL Server 2000 machine for failover availability in an Active/Active cluster.   Read more...

In this article, Brian looks at how Citrix MetaFrame can use SQL Server for its internal data repository. The basic operation of SQL Server in a Citrix MetaFrame installation is covered. In addition, Brian looks at how a DBA is an integral part of the support team for a successful Citrix MetaFrame farm.   Read more...

The .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 make it easy to create a basic but extensible database-monitoring solution without a lot of complexity or coding.   Read more...

Learn how to use ALERTs, a SQL Agent job and a stored procedure (SP) to create a copy of your critical database backups on another physical machine as soon as the database backups are created.  Read more...

Ensuring that your disk subsystem performs well and does not run out of space is a balancing act that many DBAs learn over time through trial and "out of space" errors. New author Arindam Banerjee takes a look at some of the things to consider when capacity planning.   Read more...

Not the traditional overview here. Steve Jones takes a look at the various high availability technologies from a different perspective.   Read more...

Auditing, analyzing and documenting your SQL Server installation is becoming more important all the time, especially as more and more attention is being paid to the security of your environment. Chad Miller brings us a look at a framework and a sample document you can use in your environment to conduct an audit.   Read more...

How many times have you run out of space in a database? What about on a file system? Andy Warren has had this happen a few times, especially when large imports take place. He brings us an article that describes some of the precautions he has taken to prevent this from happening.   Read more...

In this next article of the SQL Server in the Enterprise Series, we'll explore how to cluster Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 in a step-by-step manner. After this article, you should be able to cluster a SQL Server 2000 machine for failover availability in an Active/Active cluster.   Read more...

Clustering a SQL Server machine was one of the most frustrating tasks a DBA and Windows administrator had to accomplish in SQL Server 7.0 and Windows NT 4.0. With the maturity of both the OS and the DBMS in Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000, this operation has been simplified tremendously. This first article in the series of article on clustering SQL Server will explain the general architecture of clustering.   Read more...

SQL Server Alerts provide a great way for the server to notify a DBA that some event has occurred, usually something bad that they need to fix. However alerts can also be used to drive business logic processes and enable some types of actions to be safely performed without requiring extraordinary rights by a user. Author Leo Peysakhovich brings us some ideas on how we can use alerts to implement business logic processing.   Read more...

Automating SQL Server tasks is the sign of an experienced DBA. One who doesn't waste time on repetitive tasks that can be easily setup in a job, task, or some other scheduling process to run when they need to run. Haidong Ji has written a number of articles on how to perform automation and brings us yet another technique. This time he looks at managing your backup files, something that we all need to do, but all too often forget to do.   Read more...

When transferring a database to a new server, you are bound to experience a user problem. In this article by Neil Boyle, he shows you how to transfer passwords and accounts seamlessly to a new server.   Read more...

Sysforeignkeys is a valuable SQL Server resource. How many times have you had to "pick up the pieces" from a database developed by someone else and dropped on your desk? Ever get a database diagram with that? A data dictionary? Probably not too often. Jeffrey Yao has developed a system of finding those parent-child relationships automatically and displaying them so he can get up to speed quickly on these inherited databases. Read on to find out more.   Read more...

One of our favorite authors is back with a great how-to on log shipping. This isn't the baked in log shipping, this is a code your own solution that gives you a starting point for your situation. Even if you don't need it now, it's worth looking at to gain a better understanding of how shipping works.   Read more...

Andy has been busy lately on a project you'll be hearing more about soon (!), but he did manage to get part four of his managing jobs series done. This article discusses ideas for patterns to follow when building jobs, including writing to the console, setting errorlevels, and how to get them installed on the server. DBA's, if you're not developers, look at this article - this is stuff you can take to your development team and get better/more manageable jobs.   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...

Seagate has a white paper out that discusses how faster (15k rpm) drives can lead to lower cost of ownership. Interesting, and worth looking into.   Read more...

This article by Simon Galbraith (from Red Gate software, maker of SQL Compare) discusses migrating changes from development to staging, QA, and on to production. If you've never seen the need for a schema compare tool (Steve Jones!), this is worth reading.  Read more...