Are your backups enough?
“You only need one thing; a backup or a résumé. Never both.” This quote certainly summarizes a very important piece of being a DBA. You must be able to recover from a disaster. There are many ways to offer redundancy…
PRO TIP: Force table suggestions – Red-Gate SQL Prompt 6
For those SQL Prompt users, like myself, I’m sure you love its table suggestion feature. Unfortunately, there are situations where you open a query window and the table suggestions don’t immediately populate. This can be annoying if you were looking…
Transactional Replication – Find the Publisher
I manage a moderately complicated topology that includes one-way transactional replication with push subscriptions to and from several database instances. Due to my day-to-day tasks I know this topology pretty well and often I simply know what my publications are,…
Avoid GUID clustered index write problem
A globally unique identifier (GUID) is a great way to identify a record in your database. It can be easily created at the database or application layer and, when generated, is guaranteed to be unique regardless of other records already…
SQL Agent Monitoring – Long Running Job Queries
The SQL Server alert system does a great job of handling notifications for SQL Agent job failures but if want to know if a job is hung, taking longer than expected, or maybe it’s disabled and hasn’t been running, we…
Accelerating the restore process – ApexSQL Restore – Product Review
Infographic: “Your Backups – Restored from the Dead” To be a database administrator is to accept a life of stress and paranoia. We are charged with the responsibly of protecting one of a business’s most valuable resources, its data. We…
November Update – SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU #7
SQL Server 2012 SP1 Cumulative Update #7 is now available. KB Article: KB #2894115. Build Number is 11.0.3393. Applicable to @@VERSION 11.0.3000 through 11.0.3381.
Managing Multi-Instance Cluster Failovers
A couple of weeks ago I was reviewing my daily news feeds and a featured post on SQLServerCentral.com caught my eye. Michael Lacy‘s post on Managing MaxMemory Values on an Active-Active Two Node Cluster provides a solution to the problem of…
RML Utilities for MS SQL Server – CU2 Released
Version 9.04.004 of the RML Utilities for MS SQL Server has been released. This package includes: SQL Azure – Connectivity and ReadTrace/Reporter database storage support SQL Server 2012/2014 Client and Server Versions supported SQL 2005 thru SQL 2012/2014 Engine TRC…
T-SQL Command Line Options – Part 5 – SQLPS
SQLPS.exe and SQLPS the module SQLPS, like SQLPSX, is a set of extensions to Powershell for interacting with SQL Server. SQLPS first appeared with SQL Server 2008 in the form of a mini-console called SQLPS.exe. This mini-console was originally based…