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…
Back in 2009 (wow, seems like only yesterday!), I wrote about designing a recovery strategy for Stack Overflow. Back then, I wrote: With these answers in mind, Stack Overflow’s decisions not to do transaction log backups, offsite log shipping, database mirroring, and so on make good business sense. Us geeks in the crowd may not like it,…
I recently finished helping the StackExchange team migrate their SQL Server 2008 infrastructure to SQL Server 2012. These servers power StackOverflow, DBA.StackExchange.com, the new AskPatents partnership with the US Patent and Trademark Office, and hundreds of other Q&A sites that together form one of the biggest web site networks. It’s one of the most visible…
Yesterday StackOverflow announced that they’d accepted $6 million in venture capital funding. Joel Spolsky held a quick public chat to discuss it, and there were some interesting questions from the audience. I’m going to paraphrase some of the questions and give my own answers. Q: Now that StackOverflow is going to be big, will they…
StackOverflow’s database servers are hosted in a colo facility. They pay by the byte for transfer in and out of their servers, so it’s really crucial to compress the database backups as much as possible. The smaller the backups, the less they pay. They’re already using backup compression, but they wanted to explore more ways…
StackOverflow, ServerFault, and SuperUser are Q&A sites for IT professionals. I’ve blogged about why I like ServerFault before, but perhaps one of the coolest reasons for database people is that they make their data public. Every month, StackOverflow dumps out their data to XML. You can import the data dump into SQL Server, and the…
When I design a backup & recovery strategy for a database, I don’t talk to the developers, database administrators, or systems administrators first. The first people I go to are the business managers, and I ask three questions: How much money would you lose if you lost the data altogether? How much money would you…
Today, Jeff Atwood blogged about StackOverflow’s new SQL Server hardware: a Lenovo RD120, the artist formerly known as an IBM x346. Notice the big heart on the box. Servers run faster with love. Next, I’m aiming to do log shipping from the box pictured here over to Amazon S3. The StackOverflow transaction logs will be…
Whew – the Microsoft folks really came through on this one and tracked down the problem pretty quickly. I want to personally thank Denis Churin, Nikita Shamgunov and Sundaram Narayanan for their detailed investigation into the issue and helping us get it fixed. I’m going to explain the issue to help anybody else get through…
I’ve mentioned Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com a few times over the years here, and it bears repeating: he writes a great blog for developers, and DBAs need to read it too. I also follow him on Twitter, and a couple of weeks ago he mentioned he was having problems deciphering execution plans: Holy cow –…
Mornings like this, I can’t believe I get paid to do this stuff: That’s Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow, whose blog I’ve been reading for years. I actually bought a t-shirt with his site’s logo way back in 2006. Jeff effing Atwood. If I saw him, I’d ask for his autograph on…
