In a previous blog post, I walked you thru how I built my portable Hyper-V lab using Gigabyte’s GB-BXi5-4570R mini barebone PC. I even had a chance to test it out immediately after getting it all configured. I brought the kit with me to Microsoft’s Big Data Hackathon event in Toronto. And, boy, I surely don’t miss the heavy […]
PostBuilding a Portable Hyper-V Lab On A Budget Part 1
As an IT professional, it is important to have a lab environment to play around with – whether you’re a developer writing code or a systems administrator building servers – to test ideas and concepts prior to doing it for reals. Time and time again, I’ve heard folks say how expensive it is to build […]
PostHow To Identify Potential Data Loss When DBCC CHECKDB Reports Corruption – The Simple Way
A few days ago, one of my customers reached out to me on Instant Messenger and asked how to identify what the potential data loss is when DBCC CHECKDB reports corruption of a SQL Server database. My common response is the usual “it depends” in that there are cases when DBCC CHECKDB may recommend using the option REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS. […]
PostHelpful Techniques on SQL Server Database Recovery
This video is a compilation of different database recovery techniques that SQL Server DBAs should be familiar and comfortable with. We will look at recovering a database to a specific point in time, isolating critical objects or using table partitioning as an HA/DR option (more commonly called online piecemeal restore) and performing page-level restores. I […]
PostGiving away FREE Access to my SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Deep Dive Course – Round 2
Last year, as part of launching my very first online course, I gave away FREE access to my SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Deep Dive Course. I’m doing it again this year but with a totally different reason. Here’s why. I’ve been very active in the SQL Server community in one way or another. […]
PostInstalling, Configuring and Managing Windows Server Failover Cluster using PowerShell Series
Last year, I started writing an article that was supposed to be a series for Installing, Configuring and Managing Windows Server Failover Cluster using Windows PowerShell. The first of the series came out on July 2013 (which ended up being the last article I wrote for the year 2013 on MSSQLTips.com.) Since then, I’ve been involved […]
PostWhy Regular Shrinking is NOT the Right Way to Reclaim Database Space in SharePoint – nor in any SQL Server database
I recently got a question about how to reclaim database space in SharePoint. The specific database mentioned was WSS_Logging although this could have been any of the SharePoint databases or any other SQL Server database for that matter. The database was growing really fast so the farm was configured to only keep a week’s worth […]
PostGiving Away FREE Access to My SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Deep Dive Course
Yesterday, I tweeted about giving away FREE access to my online course on Udemy (and, yes, it’s a birthday gift from me). If you’ve been following my blog post, you may already know that I’ve launched my very first learning experiment last week via the online course. I haven’t really promoted the course yet (aside from […]
PostSQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Deep Dive Course Now Available
I’ve been working on this personal project since early this year. If you’ve been following my blog posts, my articles on MSSQLTips.com or even my presentations at various events, you know that my area of expertise is on SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery. I’ve compiled years of experience and exposure with SQL Server […]
PostGot A “Validating WSFC quorum vote configuration” warning when you create a SQL Server Always On Availability Group?
I bet a lot of IT professionals who are really serious about their work are like me. When they see an error or warning message like this, their first instinct is to find out what the problem is and fix it. That’s what I did when I saw this error while configuring a SQL Server […]
