In a previous blog post, I talked about the three key aspects of managing your databases – security, performance and availability. I call it “taking your databases to a S.P.A.” In the blog post, I referred to an infographic that Idera published about their accidental DBA survey results, highlighting how security and availability are not getting […]
I’ve deployed several SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in the past with high availability being the primary requirement. In some environments, there is a requirement to protect sensitive data for security and compliance reasons. Back in 2013, I had a customer who wanted to implement Always On Availability Groups for their databases. They were moving their […]
I started this series of blog post by providing a framework and a methodology for properly monitoring your IT assets. I then described why having a baseline helps provide a frame of reference for any monitoring solution. In this blog post, let’s apply those concepts in monitoring SQL Server Always On Availability Groups since […]
In a previous blog post, I wrote about why it is important to have a methodology in place for monitoring your IT assets. In this blog post, I’ll discuss what a baseline is and why it matters. Two years ago, I’ve switched my car insurance provider in an attempt to lower down my monthly […]
As an IT professional – whether you be a database administrator, a systems engineer, a storage administrator, a network administrator, developer, etc. – the one thing that we need to get a good grasp on in our day-to-day task is MONITORING. Whether we like it or not, monitoring is part of our daily life. I […]
A couple of years ago, when my friend SQL Server MVP and Microsoft Certified Master Amit Bansal (Twitter | Facebook) delivered a high availability training in Singapore, I asked if I could take a look at the course outline so I can justify attending. Back then, I was responsible for managing several SQL Server 2000 […]
In a previous blog post, I talked about the importance of using the CHECKSUM keyword in the BACKUP DATABASE command to make sure that you are not caught unaware of page corruption in your backups. I’ve also provided a very simple example of showing how this one keyword can influence whether or not you’ll have a good […]
As part of my preparation for last week’s Embarcadero DataU 2015 Online Conference, I tried searching for articles, blog posts and videos about useless SQL Server backups. Now, you might be asking, “why would I even be searching for that specific topic?” The primary (if not the most important) task of a database administrator (DBAs) […]
NO, that is certainly not a typo. I really did intend to say SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. Note that a previous blog post mentioned that you only have less than a year before SQL Server 2005 is out of extended support. So, why, you might ask, would I still be talking about features […]
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” This week started off with news about the Amazon AWS DynamoDB’s outage and Skype’s network-related issues. For organizations who do not run mission-critical applications on Amazon or who use Skype for communications, this may not be a big of a deal. But for companies like NetFlix, Buffer (I use […]
