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 previous articles, we have covered the system bus, host bus adapters, and disk drives. Now we will move up...  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...

Properly sizing your SQL Server hardware and testing application loads against them is a complex and difficult topic. Anthony Bressi brings us a great new article that gives you a systematic approach to performing your own stress test.   Read more...

How many SQL Server instances are you running? Do you ever have customers calling you stating that their application is not working, then when you research the problem you find that the instance that supports their application is unavailable? Have you ever had someone mistakenly shutdown the SQL Agent service and forget to restart it, causing a number of scheduled jobs to not be run? One of the tasks of a DBA is to monitor the availability of all SQL Server instances and services.  Read more...

Are you thinking about consolidating your SQL Servers on to fewer machines? It is an interesting idea and one that is definitely more possible with SQL Server 2005 and 64-bit servers. Steve Jones takes a look at some of the pros and cons of moving to fewer servers.   Read more...

Active/Passive SQL Server 2000 clustering gives more reliability and fault tolerance to Production SQL Server environments. When a failure occurs, all of the resources fail over from the active node to the passive node and make the passive node active. This article explains how to rebuild the node that failed and attach it back to the cluster.  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 recently implemented a SAN and shares some of the info he picked up during the purchase and implementation. This article also discusses briefly the differences between SAN and NAS, and has some links to other sites for more info as well.   Read more...

Standards are important in the computer business, both the hardware and software side. After looking at Coding Standards in a previous series, Steve Jones looks at the server side of standards beginning with hardware.   Read more...

Continuing with our worst practices series, Steve Jones looks at another administrative no-no. Making a change to your live system on the fly.   Read more...

You have spent thousands of dollars on that cool technology; clustering, redundant controllers, redundant disks, redundant power supplies, redundant NIC cards, multiple network drops, fancy tape backup devices and the latest and greatest tape technology. You are all set. There is no way your going to have downtime. Right?   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...

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...

Steve Jones examines the possible notion that a system can achieve 0% downtime. Read on to see if he thinks it's possible.   Read more...

This article addresses some common questions about the Log Shipping tool for Microsoft SQL Server 7.0.   Read more...

Lots of people are designing and building Microsoft Windows-based apps with previously unimagined reliability. Starbucks, GMAC, and FreeMarkets.com all have case studies demonstrating five nines. So, how are these companies able to achieve these levels of reliability?This month I am going to show you how to use standard Microsoft Windows technologies to make your Microsoft SQL Server™ app just like Denny's—“always open” and ready for business.   Read more...

A good place to start before clustering. Written by Brad McGhee, the founder of sql-server-performance.com.  Read more...