I made it to Cambridge and actually feel OK. I wonder how I’ll feel tomorrow, but the two day adjustment worked well. Tuesday I woke up at 5:30, and around 4:30 Wednesday before leaving for London. I flew late in the day, a 3:00 flight to Calgary, easily cleared customs… Read more

When you have a disaster, the time that you have to restore service is usually referred to as the RTO time. This stands for the Recovery Time Objective and it can is defined like this in Wikipedia:

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a… Read more

It’s an interesting article on how to pay people from Dan Ariely at Business Week. It’s a look at some of the issues with paying for knowledge work, or work that isn’t well defined. The short version is that you don’t want to specify too tightly what you expect people… Read more

In SQL Server we have three basic recovery models: full, bulk-logged, and simple. By default we find that most databases use the defaults, which mean that they are in the full recovery model.

In that case, you need to be sure that you are performing log backups, otherwise the log… Read more

Having prepped for, taken, and then failed the MCM exam this year, perhaps I’m not the best person to give you advice for certification preparation. However the MCM is a hard test, I did better than I expected, and I was close. Lots of people haven’t passed it on their… Read more

This series of blog posts are related to my presentation, The Top Ten Skills You Need, which is scheduled for a few deliveries in 2011.

Secure by Default

SQL Server doesn’t give logins or users any rights by default. That means when you add a login or user to… Read more

I saw a post recently where someone was asking about the restore sequence for a series of backups. The scenario was this:

1. Full backup starts at 3:00am, and takes 30 minutes
2. Log backup 1 starts at 3:05am, and takes 2 minutes
3. A second log backup starts at 3:35 and takes…

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