Search Results for &#8220;mirroring&#8221;

Index Maintenance, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

128

If you’re a production database administrator responsible for backups, corruption checking, and index maintenance on SQL Server, try Ola Hallengren’s free database maintenance scripts. They’re better than yours (trust me), and they give you more flexibility than built-in maintenance plans. However, the index maintenance defaults aren’t good for everyone. Here’s how they ship: Transact-SQL CREATE PROCEDURE…

Oracle HA & DR Basics [With Video]

Last Updated November 24, 2014

Jeremiah Peschka

Oracle

Oracle has different availability and recovery options from SQL Server. Being aware of what these options are and how you can use them will go a long way toward keeping your Oracle boxes just as safe as your SQL Server boxes. Here’s my 17-minute video explaining it, or you can keep reading and get your…

Reading the New Fast Track Reference Architectures from HP & EMC

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Hardware

James Serra caught three new SQL Server 2014 Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architecture designs released by EMC, HP, and Lenovo. I love reading these because they show each vendor’s state-of-the-art storage infrastructure. Two of them have remarkably similar goals – to hold a 28 TB data warehouse: From HP: HP DL380 G8 with local PCI Express…

The Very First Concern with SQL Virtualization: Licensing

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Licensing, SQL Server, Virtualization

Every single thing you do with a virtual SQL Server starts with one very important concern: how are you going to license it? The 3 Common Ways to License Virtual SQL Servers The software licensing section of my local library Developer Edition, by the guest – Developer Edition has all the power of Enterprise Edition,…

Changing SQL Server Editions: Standard, Enterprise, Evaluation and More

Last Updated August 1, 2014

“Enterprise Edition was installed for SQL Server, but it turns out that we only have a license for Standard Edition. Is that an easy change?” I see this question a lot. The answer is well documented by Microsoft, but it seems to be really hard for folks to find! If you’d like to go straight…

Using Triggers to Automatically Add Indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Bad Idea Jeans, Indexing, SQL Server

Let’s say you’ve got a vendor application that creates tables, loads them, queries them, and drops them all the time. You can’t change the code. The tables involved desperately need an index in order to go faster, and they’re your biggest performance bottleneck. Enter DDL triggers. Regular DML triggers fire when you insert/update/delete rows in a…

Performance Tuning SQL Server Transactional Replication: A Checklist

Last Updated September 14, 2018

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Replication

Swim faster! SQL Server transactional replication is a blessing and a curse. It’s a great developer tool that lets you scale out data to multiple servers, even using Standard Edition. But as your business picks up, your datasets get larger, and your customers grow more demanding, replication can start to fall behind. You need to…

Sizing SQL Server for AWS

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Let’s skip the shenanigans and get right down to it – you’re responsible for SQL Server and someone in your company wants to move things into Amazon Web Services (AWS). You’ve got SQL Server setup covered thanks to our helpful SQL Server setup checklist and you’re confident you’ve got hardware under control, but things are…

DBCC CheckDB FAQ: Check for Corruption in SQL Server

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Backup and Recovery, CHECKDB and Corruption

DBCC CheckDB: Frequently Asked Questions It’s eating our logo. Will it stop at nothing??? Q: Do I really need to run DBCC CheckDB? Yes. If you’re even partially in charge of a SQL Server and you’d like to keep your job, you should make sure CheckDB is being run regularly. (Seriously!) Q: But WHY do…

SQL Server 2014 Licensing Changes

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Licensing

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With the release of SQL Server 2014, we get to learn all kinds of new licensing changes. While I don’t work for Microsoft legal, I do have a PDF reader and a web browser. You can follow along in the SQL Server 2014 Licensing Datasheet… if you dare. Server + CAL Licensing is Still Around It’s…

Satya Slips a SQL Server Standard Secret?

Last Updated February 4, 2014

Everybody wants to know the next SQL Server release date, pricing, and feature lists, but anybody who knows those facts is bound by non-disclosure agreement and can’t say it publicly. Every now and then, though, we get lucky and someone from Microsoft slips up. That’s why I pay particular attention to Microsoft interviews as we…

Why Are You Still Using SQL Server 2005?

Last Updated May 13, 2014

Jes Schultz

The year: 2005. What was happening with the Brent Ozar Unlimited® crew? I was working on the help desk for a small company while attending Fox Valley Tech College to earn my associate degree. I think I still wanted to go into programming at that point in time! I’d never been to a user group…

Always On Availability Groups, Backup Checksums, and Corruption

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server

The latest version of sp_Blitz® alerts you if you haven’t been using the WITH CHECKSUM parameter on your backups. This parameter tells SQL Server to check the checksums on each page and alert if there’s corruption. But what about corrupt backups? Books Online says: NO_CHECKSUM – Explicitly disables the generation of backup checksums (and the validation…

Filtered Indexes vs. Table Partitioning

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jes Schultz

Indexing, Partitioning, SQL Server

It was a dark and stormy… Oh, wrong story. It was actually a warm, sunny afternoon in Charlotte, NC. I was presenting “Index Methods You’re Not Using” at PASS Summit. In this talk, I discussed how indexed views, filtered indexes, and compressed indexes can improve your query performance by reducing I/O. From stage right, an…

Update on Stack Overflow’s Recovery Strategy with SQL Server 2014

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, Stack Overflow

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,…

High Availability Doesn’t Fix Poor Performance

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jes Schultz

Development, High Availability

Imagine this: you have a database, and it’s on a SQL Server instance, which is on a server. That server may be physical or it may be virtualized. The database, or the instance, or the server, has a high availability solution implemented. It might be failover clustering; it might be synchronous mirroring; it might be…

Rebuild or Reorganize: SQL Server Index Maintenance

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Index Maintenance, SQL Server

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Index maintenance compacts a structure *and* changes physical order– both can be important! Editors Note: this post was updated in June 2014 to link to an online index rebuild bug that can cause corruption. Once up on a time, there was a database server with 500GB of data and a heavy read workload of dynamic…

Common SQL Server Clustering, AlwaysOn, and High Availability Answers

Last Updated March 22, 2019

Always On Availability Groups, Clustering, SQL Server

Our live webcast topic this week was Q&A – you could bring any HA/DR questions, and we could avoid your answers. Just kidding. Here’s the webcast – we apologize for the audio, WebEx is still getting their act together. It cleans up after the first couple of minutes. And here’s the questions we couldn’t get…

SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition Sucks, and It’s All Your Fault [UPDATE]

Last Updated March 26, 2014