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SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars

T-SQL Tuesday #41 – Presenting Comes Full Circle and I Love It!

It’s time for that monthly geek party again we like to call T-SQL Tuesday. T-SQL Tuesday is one of the greatest assemblage of geeks since the Tri-Lambda and Alpha-Mu mixer … this week. T-SQL Tuesday #41, hosted this month by Bob Pusateri (Blog|@SQLBob). You are invited to visit his blog…

2 comments, 184 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 9 April 2013

Network Packet Size: to Fiddle With or Not to Fiddle With

A network pipeline isn’t nearly as pleasant to look at as the oil pipeline (or anything) in Alaska, but it’s something that DBAs should be aware of. There is a server configuration in SQL Server that controls the size of packet in which SQL Server sends out data. This setting…

10 comments, 339 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 27 March 2013

Day 31 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Backup and Restore of the Resource Database

It has been a long journey to the final day my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series, but we have finally reached the final post, day 31. My final topic for the series is born out of a conversation I had today with my good friend and fellow DBA, Ed…

5 comments, 1,047 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 25 March 2013

Day 30 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery (T-SQL Tuesday #40): Using Partial Availability and Initialize from Backup to Replicate a Partial Database

It’s been a tough and long road to 31 Days of Disaster Recovery. It’s been very difficult coming up with quality topic ideas for the series as we near the end. For day 30 of the series, I am combining a post on performing piecemeal restores with a post on…

2 comments, 471 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 12 March 2013

The Saddest Thing I Ever Heard a Manager Say

I am currently going through the process of looking for a new opportunity for my career. I’m going through the rigamarole of doing interviews and talking numbers with recruiters, etc. I’m even considering a position at Microsoft whome I left last year after spending 5 years there. All of these…

18 comments, 4,287 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 1 March 2013

Day 29 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Using Database Snapshots to Restore Replicated Databases in Test

For day 29 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recover series, I want to talk about restoring replicated databases from database snapshots. Someone asked me recently if I had any recommendations for speeding up their unit testing on replicated databases. He has to run unit tests over and over on…

1 comments, 424 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 25 February 2013

SQL Saturday #198, Vancouver, BC Session Files

This past weekend was SQL Saturday #198 in Vancouver, B.C. It started off with a leisurely drive up to Vancouver on Friday and getting settled in to my hotel room. I was in the first slot of the day, and had a decent turnout despite the early hours. Whenever I…

0 comments, 311 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 19 February 2013

Day 28 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Recovering SQL if the Tempdb Drive Dies

Welcome to day 28 of my series 31 Days of Disaster Recovery. Today I want to talk about recovering SQL Server if your tempdb drive suddenly dies. SQL Server won’t start if it can’t start up tempdb, so it poses a challenge if you can’t get the drive up and…

4 comments, 1,462 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 14 February 2013

Day 27 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Restoring Part of a Database

Today is day 27 of my series 31 Days of Disaster Recovery, and I want to talk about restoring a partial database to a server. If you have a very large database with many filegroups, and you need to restore just part of the database, then you can perform a…

0 comments, 380 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 12 February 2013

SQLSoldier World Tour Kicks Off in 1 Week

The SQLSoldier World Tour kicks off this next Friday when I head up to Vancouver, in British Columbia, Canada. I will be doing 1 session on Saturday called Implementing Contained Databases. If you haven’t worked with this feature yet, I think I have quite a few things to tell you…

0 comments, 357 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 10 February 2013

Day 26 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: The Mysterious Case of the Long Backup

Welcome back for day 26 of my series 31 Days of Disaster Recovery. Today I want to share a tale of a mysterious backup that was running too long, and as the SAN admin reported, nothing had changed in terms of configuration of the SAN or our LUNs. We eventually…

4 comments, 380 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 10 February 2013

Day 25 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Improving Performance of Backups and Restores

My series 31 Days of Disaster recovery has been on hiatus due mostly to illness. I’ve been battling a chest cold that became bronchitis. I’m still fighting cough, but even that has improved to the point that I’m now sleeping longer at night than night. It wasn’t so much that…

6 comments, 412 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 10 February 2013

Day 24 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Handling Corruption in a Clustered Index

Welcome to day 24 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series. Previously, I’ve talked about several different forms of corruption: Nonclustered Index, Allocation Pages, and Tempdb. these were all fairly simple to fix. Today I’m going to dive into a scenario that is a little more complex, clustered indexes.…

9 comments, 474 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 31 January 2013

Day 23 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Restoring Differential Backups With New Files

It’s day 23 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series, and today’s blog post is inspired from an email i received in response to day 20′s blog post The Case of the Backups That Wouldn’t Restore. A friend shared a story with me via email about a partial restore…

2 comments, 534 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 29 January 2013

Day 22 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Which DBCC CHECK Commands Update Last Known Good DBCC

The end of the day is quickly approaching as I finish this blog post. This is day 22 in my series 31 Days of Disaster Recovery, and I want to examine which DBCC CHECK commands update the last known good DBCC check that is tracked in the header of the…

3 comments, 496 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 27 January 2013

Day 21 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: Who Deleted That Data?

Welcome back for day 21 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series. Today I want to talk about trying to track down who deleted data from a table. This little investigation started out as a question on the #sqlhelp hash tag on Twitter from Wayne Sheffield (blog|@DBAWayne) whom I…

1 comments, 563 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 26 January 2013

Day 20 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: The Case of the Backups That Wouldn’t Restore

I have decided to spend day 20 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series by relating a true tale from my harried past days of Production DBA Operations. This is a cautionary tale with an important moral. This is the case of the backups that wouldn’t restore. If you…

8 comments, 488 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 25 January 2013

Day 19 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: How Much Log Can a Backup Log

It’s day 19 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series, and today I want to talk about how much log is in a backup file. A common misconception is that when you restore a backup, you get an exact copy of the database as it was when it was…

5 comments, 485 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 24 January 2013

Day 18 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: How to CHECKDB Like a Boss

Day 18 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series is drawing to a close. It’s 11:22 PM here, and I’ve been working feverishly to finish today’s post before the calendar flips over to tomorrow. This started out as sharing a simple script I use for running DBCC CHECKDB against…

6 comments, 469 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 23 January 2013

Day 17 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery: When are Checksums Written to a Page

Today is day 17 of 31 Days of Disaster Recovery. The series has skipped a couple of days due to real life imposing itself, but we’re getting back on track by digging into the Checksum page verification option and offering up some proof that the checksum value doesn’t get written…

2 comments, 1,185 reads

Posted in SQL Server Soldier :: News from the frontlines of the database wars on 21 January 2013