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Backup, Restore, and Database Integrity

Backup design, restore testing, integrity checks, and corruption response.

292 associated posts117 primary posts

Production DBA

6 DBA Lessons I Wish Someone Would Have Taught Me Earlier

September 21, 2018

I was talking to a DBA friend of mine, reminiscing about some of the hard lessons we learned early on in our career. The more we talked, the more we realized that there should probably be a one-page cheat-sheet that you're required to read before you open SQL Server Management Studio.

1. The name of the job isn't necessarily what it does. That "Backup All Databases" job probably doesn't, and it probably has a shrink step in there for good measure.

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Setting Up SQL Server: People Still Need Help

August 13, 2018

I Like What's Happening
I wanna start off by saying that I like what Microsoft has been doing with the setup process -- it made a lot of sense to add the tempdb configuration screen, and having a checkbox to turn on Instant File Initialization was amazingly helpful.

Even in the cloud, people still need to install SQL Server, and even in the cloud, not everyone installing SQL Server is a DBA.

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[Video] Office Hours 2018/8/8 (With Transcriptions)

August 12, 2018

This week, Brent, Tara, Erik, and Richie discuss troubleshooting port blocking, page life expectancy issues, problems with turning off CPU schedulers, coordinating two jobs across servers, adding additional log files to an almost-full partition, tips for getting a new SQL Server DBA job, using alias names for SQL Servers, database going into suspect mode during disaster recovery, SQL Constant Care "Too Much Memory" warning, index operational statistics, running newer versions of SQL Server with databases in older version compat mode, and more!

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Production DBA

Does your backup strategy achieve RPO and RTO goals of the business?

July 25, 2018

When deciding on a backup strategy for a database, there are various things we must consider: Does this database need point-in-time recovery? What are the RPO (data loss) and RTO (downtime) goals? No one likes losing data or encountering unplanned downtime, but the business must decide on these goals so that we can setup an…

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Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Mentoring Is (and Isn’t)

July 23, 2018

When we built SQL ConstantCare® as a mentoring - not monitoring - product, I really meant the word mentoring.

A lot of us are loners - the only SQL Server person in the office. Nobody really understands what we're doing, and ... we're not even sure we understand, either. We were self-taught, and we didn't have anybody around to bounce ideas off of.

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Ola Hallengren’s Scripts Keep Getting Better

July 5, 2018

You Know Him, You Love Him
You trust your database backups and integrity checks to him, and he has been KILLING IT on new features lately.

A while back, Ola decided to Open Source his scripts on GitHub (Soon to be known as Microsoft LiveHub for Business Essentials). As more and more people embrace GitHub and are getting used to how it works, the feature suggestions have been rolling in.

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[Video] Office Hours 2018/5/30 (With Transcriptions)

June 2, 2018

This week, Brent, Erik, Tara and Richie discuss severity 16 error warning, best way to move databases from SQL 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2014, adding Analysis services to a cluster, taking to higher management, deadlocks in a transaction log shipping setup, syncing date between an on-prem and Azure SQL DB server, log backups, renaming SQL Server VMs, Docker, SP_Blitz question, and more.

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[Video] Office Hours 2018/5/23 (With Transcriptions)

May 26, 2018

This week, Brent, Tara, and Richie discuss relaying SQL Server performance updates to upper management, differential backups in AlwaysOn Availability environment, replication, Troubleshooting THREADPOOL Waits, an acceptable amount of preemptive waits, Postgres, and the technologies Richie is working with these days.

Here’s the video on YouTube:

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[Video] Office Hours 2018/4/11 (With Transcriptions) with Special Guest Edwin M Sarmiento

April 15, 2018

This week @EdwinMSarmiento joins Brent, Tara, Erik, and Richie to discuss high availability disaster recovery, migrating from on-premises server to Amazon's RDS, AlwaysON Availability Groups, auto-growth issues, rebuilding vs dropping/re-creating indexes, log shipping, using Service Broker with Always On Availability Groups, updating stats issues, VLF counts, measuring transaction log usage, upgrading versions, and much more.

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[Video] Office Hours 2018/3/28 (With Transcriptions)

March 31, 2018

This week, Erik and Richie discuss what to do first at a new job that never had a DBA before, basic vs advance DBA skills, tempdb files, downgrading SQL server versions, a database architecture issue, tools for monitoring SQL Server instances, other areas to focus on as a DBA besides HADR and query tuning, SQL Constant Care®, and database backups.

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Production DBA

How to Restore a SQL Server Database into Azure SQL DB Managed Instances Redux

March 16, 2018

Anything Brent Can Do
There's some things you can do with Managed Instances, and some ways you can look at data that you can't do elsewhere.

For instance, you have the ability to start an restore ASYNC -- that means if your session drops, the restore will continue headlessly in the background.

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