Blogs Dennes Torres in Blogs Azure: Small Changes that Matter I believe I’m not alone on this feeling: It seems like every time we use the Azure Portal some new feature appear. The features reproduce... 28 February 2022 7 min read
Database Administration Pamela Mooney in Database Administration DBA in training: Backups, SLAs, and restore strategies There are a handful of options when backing up SQL Server databases. A DBA must understand the differences and come up with a plan that... 09 November 2020 21 min read
Satishbabu Gunukula Why Virtual Private Catalog? Recovery Manager (RMAN) is the preferred tool to backup and recover the Oracle Database. You can use recovery catalog or the control file of the... 08 July 2015 8 min read
Robert Sheldon Stop Relying on Cloud File Stores as a Backup Strategy There is a growing assumption that Cloud file-storage services represent an ideal way of backing up files. It seems a compelling idea because it is... 22 October 2014 17 min read
Grant Fritchey Rollback and Recovery Troubleshooting; Challenges and Strategies What happens if your database deployment goes awry? Do you restore from a backup or snapshot and lose all the data changes that have happened... 26 June 2014 16 min read
Robert Sheldon The SQL Server Sqliosim Utility The sqliosim utility is provided with SQL Server to test the I/O stability and 'correctness' of a server. It doesn't measure performance but simulates the... 02 January 2014 14 min read
Allen White Backup and Restore SQL Server with the SQL Server 2012 PowerShell cmdlets There are plenty of occasions when it makes a lot of sense to do backup and restore scripts in PowerShell. Microsoft have put effort into... 03 May 2013 15 min read
Fabiano Amorim Using Optimizer_WhatIF and StatsStream to Simulate a Production Environment SQL Server's Query optimiser judges the best query plan from the data in the relevant tables and the server's hardware. How, then, can you investigate... 30 January 2013 9 min read
Grant Fritchey SQL Server Backup Questions We Were Too Shy to Ask During presentations about doing database backups and restores, there seem to be two types of questions that are commonly asked - those that come from... 07 December 2012 20 min read
Feodor Georgiev Handling Backups for Rapid Resilience The backup and restore system in SQL Server hasn't changed a great deal over the years despite a huge growth in the typical size of... 20 November 2012 10 min read
Tony Davis SQL Server Transaction Log Management by Tony Davis and Gail Shaw When things go wrong, a DBA's reputation depends on an understanding of the transaction log, both what it does, and how it works. An effective... 16 October 2012 2 min read
Feodor Georgiev Designing Databases for Rapid Resilience As the volume of data increases, DBAs need to plan more actively for rapid restores in the event of failure. For this, the intelligent use... 15 October 2012 12 min read
Ming Lee Amazon Web Services and managing our EBS volumes effectively With Amazon Web Services, you might find that a large Amazon Machine Image (AMI) as with over 1 TB, taken as a snapshot can take... 19 September 2012 8 min read
Shawn McGehee SQL Backup and Restore A DBA's tasks, from day-to-day, are rarely constant; with one exception: the need to ensure each and every day that any database in their charge... 26 March 2012 3 min read
Grant Fritchey How to Get Information About Your Backups When you need to restore but aren't 100% sure about the contents of your backup files, what do you do? Head to the headers. Grant... 23 March 2012 18 min read
Phil Factor Confessions of a DBA: My worst mistake Over the next few months, we'll be asking various well-known DBAs to describe their worst disaster caused by a mistake they made. To kick off... 23 January 2012 6 min read
Grant Fritchey Backup Verification: Tips for Database Backup Testing A Backup system is merely part of a recovery system. If your backups can't be used to recover the database, then they're useless. Do you... 06 December 2011 4 min read
Grant Fritchey Faster Restores: Best Practices to Increase Speed Backups are an everyday part of DBA life, whereas restores tend to happen on call at 3 a.m. In this article, Grant Fritchey looks at... 02 December 2011 5 min read
Database Administration Grant Fritchey in Database Administration 7 Preventable Backup Errors The loss of a company's data is often enough to put the company out of business; and yet backup errors are generally avoidable with the... 31 October 2011 16 min read
Grant Fritchey SQL Server Backup and Restore for the Accidental DBA Not everyone who is tasked with the job of ensuring that databases are backed up, and easily restorable, consider themselves to be database administrators. If... 24 May 2011 15 min read
