My public SQL Server database copy of the Stack Overflow data dump only includes clustered indexes by default. I want to keep your database size as small as possible for quick downloading. But like any database – when you create it, should you add your own indexes to make queries go faster? The answer lies…
Look, we need these things The setup for sp_AllNightLog creates jobs for four separate activities 1 job to poll for new databases to back up (primary) 1 job to poll for new databases to restore (secondary) 10 jobs to poll for backups to take (primary) 10 jobs to poll for restores to… whatever (secondary) And,…
Carry on It turns out that the only thing harder than checking for new databases restored to a SQL Server, is checking a folder for a backup of a database that doesn’t exist on another SQL Server. These are both part of what sp_AllNightLog has to do. The other components, which use workers and a…
Building stuff I sometimes really hate coming up with ideas, and much prefer someone to just say “I want this” so I can go out into the world and figure out how to do that. Occasionally though, I realize that I’m not going to get all that much direction. That’s what happened with sp_BlitzQueryStore. It…
Nick Craver and the kind folks at Stack Overflow publish their data export periodically with your questions, answers, comments, user info, and more. It’s available as an XML data dump, which I then take and import into SQL Server for teaching performance tuning. You can download the 16GB torrent (magnet), which gives you a series of 7Zip…
In our Faux PaaS project, we need a backup plan – or rather, a restore plan. On each SQL Server instance, clients can create as many databases as they want, anytime they want, with no human intervention. We need those databases covered by disaster recovery as quickly as practical. SQL Server’s newer disaster recovery options – Always On Availability Groups and…
Background: I’m working with kCura to build a Faux PaaS: something akin to Microsoft’s Azure SQL DB, but internally managed. You can catch up with what we’ve discussed so far in Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. In the last post, I talked about measuring backup and restore throughputs across different instance types, regions, storage configs, and backup locations….
In the cloud, treat your servers like cattle, not like pets. In the cloud, systems administration is very different than the on-premises stuff you’re used to. When you build VMs in the cloud with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS, meaning AWS EC2, GCE, or Azure VMs), you expect them to die. It’s just a matter of time. If…
Today’s brief Stack Overflow outage reminded me of something I’ve always wanted to blog about: There’s a gray bar across the top that says, “This site is currently in read-only mode; we’ll return with full functionality soon.” That’s not a hidden feature of Always On Availability Groups. Rather, it’s a hidden feature of really dedicated developers…
At RelativityFest this week, kCura showed more details about how their upcoming software-as-a-service hosted in Microsoft Azure works. I really like where they’re going with it. I’ve blogged about Relativity before, especially about how it uses SQL Server, but here’s a quick recap: It hosts legal data (think lawsuits, cases, investigations) Every case is its…
The statute of limitations has passed, so this week on SQL Server Radio, I get together with Guy Glantser and Matan Yungman to talk about our favorite oops moments. I talked about my very first database disaster ever – done back when I was in my 20s and working for a photo studio, using Xenix, long…
One year ago today! Well, sort of one year ago. Who knows when this thing will get published? Only God and Brent. And part of the calendar year fell during a leap year, which was just plain cruel, like a two part Buffy episode where the second part is the first episode of the next…
kCura Relativity is a legal e-discovery application that hosts its data in SQL Server. You can host it yourself, or hire a hosting partner who specializes in hosting it for you. The best hosting partners compete for Best in Service status, an award that means what it says on the tin. Starting this year, kCura’s…
This sounds really cheesy, but I’m honestly excited to be presenting again this year at kCura Relativity Fest 2015. Here’s what I’ll be talking about: How to Check Your SQL Server’s Health The Abstract: You’re a system or database administrator responsible for the uptime and performance of Relativity’s SQL Servers, but you’ve never received professional…
As I picked up a nutritious breakfast from my favorite bakery (love ya, Magnolia), I noticed a sign in the window saying they were certified Kosher. As I usually do, I thought about how that kind of thing applied to databases. The Star-K symbol on food products or restaurants means that the ingredients and processes have been…
I’ve seen servers with thousands of databases on a single SQL Server, and it works. Sure, opening the databases list in SQL Server Management Studio is painful, and a lot of third party monitoring tools fall over, but it’s not so bad once you know how to work around these issues. But there’s two issues…
You may have heard the term “commodity hardware” thrown around when describing solutions like Redis, Elasticsearch, or kCura’s new Data Grid. Commodity hardware refers to cheap, standardized servers that are easy to buy off the shelf from any vendor. Here’s a typical example of a 2u, 2CPU commodity hardware server: Supermicro SYS-1028R-TDW 1U rack server Two Xeon E5-2600…
Performance tuning of independent software vendor (ISV) databases is a little tricky. To understand who does what, let’s think through all of the work required with building and hosting a database application: Typically the two parties involved – the vendor and the customer – start at opposite ends of the table. The software vendor starts…
Your users want Relativity to be up at all times. What’s the first step? How much work is involved? What will it all cost? I’ll give you a simple worksheet to get management and the IT team on the same page, and then show you how to turn those specs into a rough project plan and…
Today at Relativity Fest in Chicago, kCura Relativity 9 introduces the option to move some text storage out of Microsoft SQL Server and into kCura’s new Data Grid, a tool built atop the open source Elasticsearch. Is kCura abandoning SQL Server? No, but understanding what’s going on will help you be a better database administrator and developer….
