Search Results for &#8220;log shipping&#8221;

True story A long time ago, I had to actually do stuff to databases. One thing I had to do was move data files around. Maybe some knucklehead had put system databases on the C: drive, or a LUN was filling up, or we got a new LUN. You know, whatever. Natural curiosity oft leads…

What Is a Staging Environment and How Do You Build One?

Last Updated December 9, 2018

Architecture, SQL Server

If you’re a full time production database administrator, you need a staging environment. This is where you test infrastructure tasks like failing over mirroring, doing a disaster recovery role swap, cluster quorum changes, log shipping configuration, and patching. You need to test this stuff repeatedly so that when you’re under pressure in the production environment, you…

What’s Covered in the Senior DBA Class of 2016?

Last Updated April 9, 2017

You’re a SQL Server DBA who is ready to advance to the next level in your career but aren’t sure how to fully master your environment and drive the right architectural changes. That’s about to change in one week of learning and adventure with me, Brent Ozar. Join me to learn how size, architect, maintain, and troubleshoot…

Replication Won’t Refresh Your Dev and Pre-Production Environments

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Development, Replication

It’s almost like the real thing, except it’s totally different. At first glance, SQL Server’s transactional replication seems like it’s useful for moving data around in all sorts of situations: it works in Standard Edition, it’s not synchronous, and you can have multiple subscribers. Why People Want Replication to Test and Pre-Production Environments Setting up…

Why Zero Data Loss in SQL Server is Harder Than You Think

Last Updated April 9, 2017

Architecture, High Availability

But Kendra, it can’t be that hard… after all, we have synchronous modes in Database Mirroring and Availability Groups, right? Synchronous Commit doesn’t mean “zero data loss” When we think about limiting data loss, the first thing we think of is a technology that lets us reduce points of failure. If every transaction must be…

How to Set Up Standard Edition Always On Availability Groups in SQL Server 2016

Last Updated March 5, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server

191

SQL Server 2016 adds Availability Groups in Standard Edition. While the licensing details can obviously change right up to release date, here’s what was announced at the Ignite conference: Limited to two nodes only (a primary and a secondary) Like mirroring, you can’t read from the secondary, nor take backups of it But like database…

Moving Databases Made Easy – SQL Server on a File Share

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Storage

We’ve all had to move a database. For databases above a small size, this is a painful process. While there are a number of ways that you can move a database without downtime, they all involve a lot of extra work. What if there were something easier? Every database is unique and precious. What’s the…

Signing off

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jes Schultz

Company News

Dear Brent Ozar Unlimited readers: thanks for following me for three great years. I’m off on a new adventure, but I hope to see you at a user group, a SQL Saturday, or a conference in the future! I’m leaving with a lot of great memories – and here are a few of my favorites…

How to Configure Ola Hallengren’s IndexOptimize Maintenance Script

Last Updated April 14, 2023

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

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…

SQL Server Query Store

Last Updated December 19, 2017

#SQLPass, Execution Plans, Query Store (QDS), SQL Server

Execution Plan Hell I spend most of my day tuning SQL Server to make it go faster. I’m usually called in after the fact, when the app has become intolerably slow. One of the first things I ask is, “What’s changed?” Nobody ever knows with any sense of accuracy. I understand – until now, SQL Server hasn’t…

The Second Concern for SQL Server Virtualization: Recoverability

Last Updated October 3, 2014

Virtualization

Your first concern is licensing, and once you’ve got that under control, it’s time to talk about backups, restores, and uptime. The business begins by defining the RPO and RTO requirements for high availability, disaster recovery, and “oops” deletions. Use our High Availability Planning Worksheet and fill in the “Current” column on page 1: High…

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…

Performance Tuning SQL Server Transactional Replication: A Checklist

Last Updated September 14, 2018

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…

How to Pick a Monitoring Tool

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Monitoring

Step 1: Make a list of 5 problems you’ve faced in the last couple of months that you needed alerting on. If you’ve got a help desk ticket system, look at the ticket types that occur most frequently and cause the most outage times. For me as a DBA, that might be: SQL Server service…

Sizing SQL Server for AWS

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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…

SQL Server 2014 Licensing Changes

Last Updated February 9, 2017

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…

Two SQL Server Resources That Improved When You Weren’t Looking

Last Updated November 22, 2013

SQL Server learning materials seem to live at two extremes. Blog posts are short and to the point, but they don’t cover material in depth. Books are long and detailed, but to quote a famous philosopher, ain’t nobody got time for that. Enter two resources that have been out for quite a while. They aim…

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

Last Updated February 9, 2017