Wanna hear a good one? About a year and a half ago, my team had probably the worst month in our careers. We pulled 70-80 hour weeks, one after another, and couldn’t figure out what on earth was going wrong. It culminated in a marathon all-weekend outage that completely hosed one SAN and threatened another.
We rebuilt 19 servers from scratch, and I mean from scratch – we had no available backups of the applications or data.
The Usual Suspects
In a webcast today at 11am Eastern, 8am Pacific, I’ll explain what went wrong, and how you can avoid a similar fate. Even better, that’s just one of the several stories I’m going to tell along with the help of these guys:
- Tim Ford (Blog – Twitter) – Senior DBA for Spectrum Health, West Michigan PASS Chapter leader, SQLServerPedia Editor and BaconBitsNBytes author.
- Tom LaRock (Blog – Twitter) – Database Engineering Team Lead for ING Investment Management, PASS Board of Directors member, SQLServerPedia Editor and BaconBitsNBytes author.
- Iain Kick (I gotta get this guy to blog & tweet, heh) – Lead Systems Consultant for Quest Software, and a former DBA for Framlington Group and ITouch PLC. You wouldn’t believe some of the disaster recovery horror stories he gets to see as a Questie.
I’m really looking forward to this webcast – it promises to be a lot of fun. I wish I’d have blogged about it earlier, come to think about it.
You can register for the webcast here, but if you can’t make it, no worries – we’ll be recording it and I’ll announce when the recording is online.
In related news, if you missed last week’s excellent webcast by Michelle Ufford on index fragmentation, the archive is online now. She used the undocumented DBCC PAGE command to show exactly what index fragmentation looks like: you can see the difference before and after. One of my favorite webcasts ever, and it pushed me to step up my game on my own presentations.
looking forward to the recording, damn these international timezones