A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!   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...

Andy takes a look at the new book on DMO and likes what he sees - "great book for beginner and intermediate DMO users!". We've been supporters of DMO for a while and we're glad to see a new book on the subject. Read the review, add your comments, buy the book!   Read more...

All of do us regular backups. Ok, all of us SHOULD do regular backups. In this article Andy comments on why having a backup plan isn't enough and why you should look at some other options for when you need to fix data errors. This really speaks to the goal of minimizing down time using low tech, readily available solutions. If you're not interested yet, we'll add this - one of the alternatives he suggests is Microsoft Access!   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...

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 allows you to restore transactional replication databases without reinitializing subscriptions or disabling and reconfiguring publishing and distribution. You can set up replication to work with log shipping, enabling you to use a warm standby server without reconfiguring replication.   Read more...