Category: Backup and Recovery

Sandra Delany (LinkedIn) wrote a well-thought-out blog post called, "Should a SQL Server DBA Know Windows Clustering?" She's got about 20 years of DBA experience, and she works for Straight Path (a firm I respect) as a consultant. You can probably guess based on her background that yes, she believes you should know how to set up, configure, and troubleshoot Windows clustering. It's a good post, and you should read it.

I've worked with Microsoft SQL Server for so long that I just kinda took backups for granted. We run a backup command, and SQL Server: Logs activity to the transaction log while the backup is running Reads the exact contents of the database files, and writes them out to a backup file When it's done,…

Ola Hallengren's free maintenance solution is widely used as a replacement for SQL Server maintenance plans. It's a more powerful, flexible tool for backups, corruption checking, and index & statistics updates. If you're using it for backups, there are two quick, easy changes that can dramatically reduce your nightly job runtimes. First, set @NumberOfFiles =…

Someone told you that you should be using Ola Hallengren's Maintenance Scripts. You've downloaded his Maintenance Solution.sql, you ran it in the master database, and ... now you're not sure what's supposed to happen next. In this post, we'll cover how to configure backups.
First, configure the Agent jobs.
When MaintenanceSolution.sql ran, it created a few Agent jobs. You can see them in SSMS or Azure Data Studio under SQL Server Agent, Jobs:

Snapshot backup tools like Azure Site Recovery and Veeam are great for sysadmins. They let you quickly replicate a virtual machine to somewhere else without knowing too much about the server's contents.

To pull it off, they use the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service to do snapshot backups - often referred to as VSS snaps. In a nutshell:

Even if you're not writing to different physical drives, you can get faster backups with Microsoft SQL Server when you back up to multiple files. Your exact numbers are going to vary based on your server and your utter inability to rub two sticks together to make fire, but let's see how I do.

Here's the hardware I'm using:

I remember it really clearly.

In the mid 1990s, long, long before I went into IT as a career, I was working at a photo studio in Muskegon, Michigan. They specialized in high school class photos, and they did a LOT of 'em. Every morning, the photographers would come into the office to collect printouts for the pictures they were going to shoot that day - student name, address, time of the photos, that kind of thing.

For this month's T-SQL Tuesday, Kevin Chant asked us to dream up our fantasy SQL Server feature. I'm sure people are gonna ask for flying cars and gene splicing, and that's awesome. I'm excited to hear the kinds of things they dream up.

Me? I've got a really simple ask.