Acing an Audit
Audits for technology groups can be time consuming and stress employees out. An article Steve Jones finds says an insurance company only needed 30 minutes to ace their audit.
My SQL Server Database is Corrupt - Now What?!
How do you recover from corruption if your organization doesn't have a disaster recovery handbook? And how can you prevent the same corruption from recurring?
Providing SQL Agent Job Log Data for Developers
As a production Database Administrator, I do not want to give Developers direct access to the SQL Server Agent job log especially for servers in the DMZ. Another problem we have is that when there is a lot of log data for a job, the default job log doesn't contain the full log detail and that makes it harder to troubleshoot. Most of all, we are trying not to use a different code set for deployment based on the environment. Basically we want to use the same methods to deploy our jobs to Development, Test and Production.
Not Pulling the Plug Out
Phil Factor on his renewed appreciation for the "customer-focused" culture of the Data Platform Group at Microsoft
Still 32
There is likely still a lot of 32-bit software out there, even as the x86 platform appears to be dying away. Steve Jones notes that you'll likely be dealing with 32/64 bit issues in your career.
Update statistics in parallel
This articles shows a technique that generates and launches an SSIS package to update statistics in parallel.
Beating Backup Corruption
The most critical task for all DBAs is to have a Backup and Recovery strategy that ensures, every day, that in the event of a disaster they can restore and recover any database, within acceptable limits for data loss and downtime. Even with all the required backups in place, it's easy to miss subtle failings in the overall plan that can, and eventually will, defeat your recovery plans.
Geeky Oscars
This Friday Steve Jones takes a break from serious technical discussions. With the Oscar nominees announced there were lots of films left out of the awards. Are there some of these you'd recommend?
Free eBook: SQL Server Backup and Restore
You can download a free eBook from SQLServerCentral and Red Gate software on the most important task a SQL Server DBA or developer needs to understand.
We Loaded 1TB in 30 Minutes with SSIS, and So Can You
In February 2008, Microsoft announced a record-breaking data load using Microsoft® SQL Server® Integration Services (SSIS): 1 TB of data in less than 30 minutes. That data load, using SQL Server Integration Services, was 30% faster than the previous best time using a commercial ETL tool. This paper outlines what it took: the software, hardware, and configuration used. We will describe what we did to achieve that result, and offer suggestions for how to relate these techniques to typical scenarios. Even for customers who don't have needs quite like this benchmark, such efforts can teach a lot about getting optimal performance.
Blogs
Learn about Modern Microsoft Apps in San Diego
By Steve Jones
I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I...
How To Deploy Fabric SQL and Azure SQL Databases with Azure DevOps
By ReviewMyDB
Fabric has CI/CD built in, but if you've tried to use it for database...
A New Word: Attriage
By Steve Jones
attriage – n. the state of having lost all control over how you feel...
Forums
Forward Deployed Engineers
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Forward Deployed Engineers
TRY_PARSE vs TRY_CONVERT in SQL Server: From Basics to Practical Usage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item TRY_PARSE vs TRY_CONVERT in SQL...
DBCC CHECKDB Limits II
Comments posted to this topic are about the item DBCC CHECKDB Limits II
Question of the Day
DBCC CHECKDB Limits II
I have a SQL Server 2025 database that I want to check for corruption every night. One of the things we do is disable indexes used for ETL loads during the weekend and re-enable them on Monday morning. If we run DBCC over the weekend, are our disabled indexes checked for consistency?
See possible answers