Just about a year ago, I talked about the importance of setting goals for yourself, both personally and professionally, making sure they’re lofty enough to challenge you, and making them public in order to hold yourself accountable.  It’s hard to believe a year has passed already, but here we are,… Read more

I think it’s only fitting to follow up a post about performance reviews and self-evaluations with a post about slacking off, don’t you?  All work and no play makes Colleen a very grumpy DBA, and no one wants that.  So today I’m sharing with you some ways to stretch the… Read more

My annual performance review at work is coming up shortly, and this year they’ve decided to do things a bit differently.  For the first time in my career, I’ve been asked to perform a self-evaluation.  There’s no form to fill out.  Overall, it’s very unstructured; we’re simply being asked to… Read more

All this talk of testing backups and data integrity and checksums has me thinking that maybe now would be a good time to discuss page verification options in SQL Server.  Sometimes bad things happen to good SANs and data pages aren’t quite the same when we read them as when… Read more

If you haven’t already heard, Cleveland is hosting SQLSaturday #164 on August 18.  That date is coming up fast and right now we need you (yes you!).  The call for speakers is open for 2 more weeks, so if you’re interested in presenting, submit an abstract.

Cleveland’s last SQLSaturday Read more

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot of discussion these days about testing backups and having a good restore plan in place, before you need it.  You don’t want to be “testing” your backups at 3am during a critical restore operation.

Verify Backup Integrity (aka…

Read more