Clients and Case Studies

Indexing, Stack Overflow

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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…

sp_AllNightLog: Creating Jobs Like I’m The President

August 10, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, Log Shipping, SQL Server

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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,…

sp_AllNightLog: Poll Vaulting

July 21, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, Log Shipping, SQL Server

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…

sp_AllNightLog: ¿Por que los queues?

July 7, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

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…

New Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2017-06)

July 6, 2017

Stack Overflow

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…

Introducing sp_AllNightLog: Log Shipping at Scale, Open Source

June 29, 2017

Backup and Recovery, First Responder Kit, kCura Relativity

faux paas

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…

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 3: What the Ideal Engineering Team Looks Like

May 25, 2017

Architecture, kCura Relativity, Microsoft Azure

faux paas

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.…

Building a Faux PaaS, Part 1: The SQL Server DevOps Scene in 2017

May 9, 2017

Architecture, kCura Relativity

faux paas

In the cloud, treat your servers like cattle, not like pets. Rounding up a herd of servers in Texas 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…

When Always On Isn’t: Handling Outages in Your Application

January 24, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, Stack Overflow

always on, availability groups, often on, stack overflow

Today’s brief Stack Overflow outage reminded me of something I’ve always wanted to blog about: Stack Overflow is in limp-home mode 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…

Why I Love kCura RelativityOne Even Though I Don’t Use It

October 12, 2016

azure, kcura, relativity, relativityone

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. Presenting at Relativity Fest 2016 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,…

My Favorite Database Disaster Stories

April 28, 2016

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, Processes and Practices

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…

Psst… Hey buddy, you want some E-Discovery?

March 29, 2016

dba, development, ediscovery, kcura, relativity, sql server

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…

What kCura Relativity Best in Service Means for SQL Server DBAs

November 10, 2015

best in service, kcura, relativity

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…

How to Download the Stack Overflow Database via BitTorrent

October 3, 2015

Stack Overflow

Time to make SQL Server demos a little more fun. Now you can download a torrent of the SQL Server database version of the Stack Overflow data dump. Full size circa 2018/06: 38GB torrent (magnet.) Expands to a ~304GB SQL Server 2008 database. Because it’s so large, we distribute it with BitTorrent – if you’re new to…

I’m Presenting at kCura Relativity Fest 2015 in Chicago

July 27, 2015

kcura, relativity, relativity fest

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…

Databases Need a Kosher Certification

May 8, 2015

ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, SQL Server

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. This database is totally free of heaps. The Star-K symbol on food products or restaurants means…

How Many Databases Can I Put on One SQL Server?

February 4, 2015

Architecture, Backup and Recovery, ISV and SaaS Database Design, SQL Server

backup, dr, ha, recovery, rpo, rto

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…

What Is Commodity Hardware?

December 11, 2014

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…

Who’s Allowed to Add Indexes to ISV Apps?

December 4, 2014