RPO, RTO, failover procedures, service continuity, and DR readiness.
41 associated posts41 primary posts
I was in Rome to attend a teaching conference, and my AirBnB had the most beautiful view overlooking Rome and Vatican City. While having my morning coffee, I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento - and I didn't go through many questions because some of them required really long answers, and I had a great time with those.
For the rest of December, I'm out vacationing in China and Japan. For this episode, I'm coming to you from the People's Park in Zhengzhou, China, which is kinda like the Chicago of China. It's in the middle of the US, bigger than people think (13 million people), and has beautiful parks.
https://youtu.be/BT9L-Qiv64c
Last night, two major IT disasters struck:
Microsoft Azure's Central region went down for about 4 hours. The official post-mortem isn't out yet, but rumor has it that while decommissioning legacy storage services, the product group deleted the wrong thing.
Crowdstrike pushed a bad update, leading to blue screens of death on Windows systems worldwide, affecting banking, healthcare, airlines, and more.
On August 30, Azure's Australia East data center had a big problem, affecting customers like Bank of Queensland and Jetstar. Here's the timeline: 30 August 2023 @ 08:41 – Voltage sag occurred on utility power line 30 August 2023 @ 08:43 – Five chillers failed to restart 30 August 2023 @ 10:30 – Storage and SQL…
When In-Memory OLTP came out, I worked with it briefly, and I remember coming away thinking, "Who in their right mind would actually use this?" I was so horrified that I wrote a presentation about it and gave it at a couple of conferences:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlrc56Q4ABQ
Not all of the questions you post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are hard. Some of 'em can be answered in one line:
Q: accidentalDBA: Hi Brent, My friend is moving from two physical servers (production + failover) to VMs on the same host and SAN. His manager wants to keep log shipping as a DR solution. I advised against this as most disasters would affect both VMs equally. Am I missing something?
I'm not talking about Agent alerts when jobs fail. That's fine when you can't get the business to spring for a monitoring system.
I'm talking about using SQL Server to send emails to confirm a customer's order, alert that a product is low on stock, or other business processes.
I have a secret setup checklist.
Oh sure, our free First Responder Kit has a SQL Server setup checklist that walks you through a few things you need to do before you install, plus a few things to do immediately afterwards. That's good. It's actually pretty darned good.
This week, Tara, Erik, and Richie discuss using Docker in dev environment, in-place upgrades, disaster recovery, the minimum amount of CPU and RAM for new SQL Server VMs, troubleshooting long-running SQL agent jobs, dbcc checkdb running longer than normal, and more.
Here’s the video on YouTube:
This week, Brent, Erik, Tara, and Richie discuss syncing logins and database data via log shipping, monitoring page life expectancy, cumulative update issues, when to change MAXDOP, doing SQL Server install on AWS, connecting to SQL Server instance on a virtual box from the desktop where the virtual box is running, and what real DBAs drink.
Last week, Azure suffered a day-long outage. One of the services involved was Visual Studio Team Services (aka Azure DevOps), and that team just published their outage postmortem.
The postmortem is FANTASTIC: open, honest (at least it reads that way), and goes into enough technical detail to satisfy a wide variety of readers from managers to technical implementers.
When I build a server, success means not touching the server again for 2-3 years. I already have enough crappy, unreliable servers that fall over when someone walks past. I only wanna build good, permanent stuff going forward.
So when I build disaster recovery for something, I want to test it 3 ways:
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.
This week, Brent, Erik, Tara, and Richie to discuss cloud server disaster recovery, Availability Groups troubleshooting, SQL Server deadlocks, slow tempdb latency, migrating to Azure, SQL Server 2017 gotchas, how to set up your dev environment when looking for a job, best allocation unit size for disks hosting data files and good replacement for linked servers.
This week, Pinal Dave joins Brent, Tara, and Richie to discuss replication latency, partitioning tables, transactional replication, troubleshooting 3-rd party application performance, SQL ConstantCare® update, SQL Server errors, copying data over from a database with read-only access, reducing blocking timeouts, backups to the cloud, and more replication questions!
Here’s the video on YouTube:
This week Brent, Erik, and Richie discuss truncating & repopulating, failed logins, their choice for high availability, PowerBI, read committed isolation, parameter sniffing, database mirroring, extended events and failing queries and re-indexing large tables.
Here’s the video on YouTube:
There's a lot that goes into a Disaster Recovery plan. One of them is offsite backups. There are some businesses that don't have backups going offsite, let alone a Disaster Recovery plan.
This conversation has taken place more than I thought it would.
This week, Brent, Erik, and Richie discuss the new Extended Events Profiler, using SQL audit vs a trigger to log what people do, log shipping, migrating from on-prem to cloud, best practice for a database owner, SQL Server performance improvement, the difference between simple, bulk-logged, and full recovery models and when to use them, tools for transferring databases from one server to another, VSS Snapshot backups, encryption and more.
We've talked about how to do a free SQL Server health check, and then how to drill deeper with performance check.
After these two, management usually steps back and asks, "Wait a minute - how'd we get into this mess? And long term, strategically, what should we do next?"
This week, Brent, Tara, and Richie discuss what they think about having no more service packs for SQL Server 2017 and newer versions, shrinking log files, how many servers can one DBA manage, log backups, mirroring vs Availability Groups vs log shipping, and their next company retreat location.
Here’s the video on YouTube:
