The March edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column.

This month's topics are:

• Distributed transactions and database mirroring - why they don't work together
• Background processes that can cause I/Os even with no connections to the server
• How to restore backups from a file containing multiple appended backups
• The perennial problem of production databases being too large to restore in development

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff458345.aspx.

Happy New Year! 

The January edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column.

This month's topics are:

• Using backups for corruption recovery
• Why snapshot isolation is required when using change tracking, and its performance implications
• Is DBCC CHECKDB a really comprehensive integrity check?
• The difference between data file and log file shrinking

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee914612.aspx.

The November 2009 edition of TechNet Magazine is up on the web and contains my latest feature article, the second in a 3-part series on backups/restores/repairs.

In this article I explain all about using the RESTORE command. Not much point having backups if you don't know how to use them! Topics include:

• The four phases of a restore operation - how they work and how you can speed them up
• Figuring out what you need to restore when a disaster happens
• Figuring out what you're actually able to restore
• Using WITH RECOVERY / NORECOVERY / STANDBY
• Point-in-time restore operations
• Considerations when restoring to a different location

There seem to be a few formatting issues when the magazine's web folks put the article up - I've notified them and hopefully they'll fix them soon.

You can get to the article at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee677581.aspx

Enjoy!

(First blog post from Poland! We're here to present at the Microsoft Poland Technology Summit.) 

The October edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column.

This month's topics are:

• Unexpected consistency checks?
• How much space is each database using in the buffer pool 
• Difference between SUSPECT and RECOVERY_PENDING 
• Why database mirroring failure detection isn't instant

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.10.sqlqa.aspx.

The August edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column.

This month's topics are:

• Proactive page checksum failure detection
• Why GUIDs make for bad clustered index keys 
• Possible problems using a log shipping secondary for reporting 
• Recovery model choice for log size management

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd776512.aspx.

The July 2009 edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web and include a feature article I wrote explaining backups. It's the first in a 3-part series, with parts 2 and 3 being on recovering from disasters using backups and recovering from disasters without backups.

The backup article covers:

• Full backups
• Differential backups
• Log backups
• Putting together a backup strategy
• Bakcup integrity

It debunks a lot of myths about backups, explains in detail how each backup works, and explains the pros and cons of some different backup strategies.

Check it out at Understanding SQL Server Backups - enjoy!

PS I'll also be presenting a session on backup strategies at SQL Connections in November and covering them in my post-con workshop at PASS in November the week before.

PPS I've just signed a contract with TechNet Magazine so that there will be something on SQL Server in every issue - either my SQL Q&A column or a feature article. Very cool!

The May 2009 TechNet Magazine is now available online, and it's the annual security issue. In there is an article I wrote highlighting 10 common security issues (and solutions) you should worry about if you're not a security-savvy DBA. It covers:

• Physical security
• Network security
• Attach surface minimzation
• Service accounts
• Restricting use of administrator privileges
• Authentication
• Authorization
• SQL injection
• Disaster recovery
• Auditing

There are also two screencasts of me demonstrating Transparent Data Encryption and SQL Server Audit, both in SQL Server 2008. 

To quote myself from the end of the article:

As far as takeaways from this article are concerned, I want you to realize that there are some steps you need to go through to ensure the data you are storing in SQL Server is as secure as you need it to be. This is especially important when you inherit a SQL Server instance that someone else has been managing. It's just like buying a house from someone—you need to ask if the alarm works, if the yard is fenced in, and who has copies of the keys. Running through the list I've given in this article is a good start, but make sure you dig deeper in areas that are relevant to you.

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.05.sql.aspx.

Enjoy!

The April edition of TechNet Magazine is available on the web now and has the latest installment of my regular SQL Q&A column.

This month's topics are:

• Disappearing errors with DBCC CHECKDB
• Provisioning tempdb when moving from 2000 to 2008
• Does fillfactor prevent fragmentation and should it be set instance-wide
• Avoiding FILESTREAM performance problems

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.sqlqa.aspx

OK - last content post today. I forgot that the February TechNet Magazine also has the latest edition of my regular SQL Q&A column. This month's column covers:

• Should backup compression be enabled at the instance level?
• Client redirection during database mirroring failovers
• Partition-level lock escalation in SQL Server 2008
• Is it ever safe to rebuild a transaction log?

Check out the column at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.02.sqlqa.aspx

Wow - today is all about new content. As if I haven't already blogged about enough stuff to keep you reading through next week, the February issue of TechNet Magazine is now available and contains a feature article I wrote about understanding how logging and recovery work inside SQL Server.

The article covers:

• What is logging?
• What is recovery?
• The transaction log (include logical and physical architecture)
• Recovery models and how they affect the behavior of the transaction log

There's also a ten-minute screencast video where I demonstrate a runaway transaction log.

Check it out at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.02.logging.aspx.

TechNet Magazine is publishing a series of SQL Server 2008 tips every day through January - mostly taken from upcoming Microsoft Press books on SQL Server 2008. Later this month it will include some tips from our upcoming book Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Internals. Check out the tips at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd391795.aspx.

Enjoy!

The January 2009 issue of TechNet Magazine is now available on the web and has a new article I wrote on Advanced Troubleshooting with Extended Events in SQL Server 2008. The article covers:

• An overview of troubleshooting in SQL Server, along with links to a bunch of tools like DMVStats and RML
• An overview of extended events, with descriptions of all the parts of the feature and how to investigate them with the new DMVs
• Performance considerations of how you setup an extended events session, especially on multi-core servers
• An example where I build an I/O chargeback mechanism to tie into a system controlled by the SQL Server 2008 resource governor

You can get to the article here, which also has a link to a screencast of me doing a demo. And you can bet that this is an area I'll be blogging about going forward too.

Enjoy!

PS This issue also has the editorial where I get made a Contributing Editor

As you may have noticed, I *really* like blogging and writing about SQL Server (to the point that Kimberly jokes in our sessions and workshops that I blog so much I don't sleep...). Well, to cap off our very successful conference season, I'm very pleased to announce that I've just been made a Contributing Editor of TechNet Magazine, with effect from the January 2009 issue (due out in a couple of weeks). This means a huge amount to me and is great incentive for years more blog posts and articles - maybe now they'll let me do an article all about DBCC CHECKDB .

Thanks to everyone who reads and responds to my articles and Q&A columns in the magazine, and to (my editor) Senior Editor Matthew Graven, and the magazine Editor-in-Chief Joshua Hoffman!

It's really scary how quickly time flies - seems like it was just last week when I last blogged about TechNet Magazine (actually it was a month ago when I blogged about my 2008 Change Tracking article - see here). Anyway, a new issue of TechNet Magazine has just come out and this one has the latest installment of my bi-monthly SQL Q&A column.

This month's topics are:

• How row-overflow columns can lead to poor range scan performance, even on completely defragmented indexes.
• Combining database mirroring and failover clustering without undesired failover behavior.
• Adding differential backups to a full+log backup strategy to lower recovery time.
• Memory settings for multi-instance failover clustering

You can get to the column online at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd228989.aspx.

Enjoy!

PS If you have any ideas for what would make a good SQL Q&A topic, please drop me a line - paul@sqlskills.com