Christmas and New Year have just gone by. You may have stories about how you celebrated the holidays – the sumptuous meals shared with all of the family members, the conversations around the fireplace, opening gifts on Christmas eve, etc. Ours is a bit different than usual. Because, on the day before Christmas, we were on […]
PostNOW AVAILABLE: Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) for the Smart SQL Server DBA
SQL Server features like Availability Groups and Failover Clustered Instances rely heavily on Windows Server Failover Clustering. A deep understanding of the underlying principles and fundamental technologies spell the difference between successful implementations and horrible disasters. This advanced, deep-dive course is designed for both beginners as well as advanced senior IT administrators, SQL Server DBAs […]
PostEnd-to-End SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery
High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) is an area that every SQL Server DBA needs to be comfortable with, especially when dealing with mission-critical database systems. One cannot wait until a real disaster strikes before learning how to deal with it. This advanced, deep-dive course is designed for SQL Server DBAs and system administrators to […]
PostRecent Amazon and Skype Outages and The Cost Of NOT Having A Proper HA/DR Strategy
“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 […]
PostWhat Multibase Differential Backups Are and How They Can Cause Failures To Your Backup Strategies
Taking database backups is still considered to be the most important task that any database administrator does. That’s why it is also important to make sure that database backups not only complete successfully but have also been validated and tested. I’ve written several blog posts about the importance of backups and why having successful backups is not enough. […]
PostKnowing and Understanding Your Disaster Recovery Strategy
This last weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at SharePoint Saturday Montreal – being one of the few English speakers for the event – on the topic of SQL Server high availability and disaster recovery options for SharePoint. After my presentation, one of my SharePoint MVP friends approached me about a database corruption issue that happened on […]
PostData Types and How They Affect HA/DR
I previously wrote about Data Types and How They Affect Database Performance which was a way to get database developers to think about the small things that affect overall performance. As a high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) professional myself, I like to think of how data types affect database availability and recoverability. The fact […]
PostThe Lion, The Switch and The Wardrobe on Disaster Recovery
While promoting my online virtual class a few days ago, several people asked me about a module that caught their attention – The Lion, The Switch and The Wardrobe. The title of the module was based off of one of the Narnia movies. Since it caught their attention, I started explaining the contents of the module in […]
