TechNet Webcast Series for the ITPro – Part 10 of 11

OK – today's session was quite fun… lots of demos and quite a few "tie-ins" where I tried to bring together many things that we've touched on in our series. And – that's really the point of the series – creating a reliable, robust, scalable and available environment takes MANY different features. You really need to architect a complete solution in order to handle the many potential problems that may occur. And, unfortunately, it's a never ending process; you're never done and you're never going to get everything (sorry!). You will need to re-evaluate, monitor, and manage your system as long as it runs to keep it reliable, available and fast. Something will come up…someday…that you didn't think about, evaluate and/or prevent. But, then you'll know and then you'll put something into place to keep it from happening again.

So – to tie back into some of the other sessions and resources, here is a list of everything to date in the series as well as a few specific references I made during the session.

Demo Scripts are here: 20060512_TechNetWebcast-Part10.zip (25.46 KB) (updated on Sat, May 13 at 2:55 PDT)
Credit Database zip is here. NOTE: This is a 48MB zip which expands to a 175MB backup and restores to a 700 MB database (with a lot of free space for testing, etc.).

TechNet Webcast Series

Session 1: A Fast-Paced Feature Overview and Series Introduction (Level 200)
   Presenter: Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 2: Security (Level 200)
   Presenter: Bob Beauchemin, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 3: Understanding Installation Options and Initial Configuration (Level 200)
   Presenter: Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 4: Upgrade Considerations and Migration Paths (Level 200)
   Presenter: Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 5: Effective Use of the New Management Tools (Level 200)
   Presenter: Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 6: New Application Design Patterns for Scalability and Availability and the Operational Implications of Service Broker (Level 200)   
   Presenter: Bob Beauchemin, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 7: Technologies and Features to Improve Availability (Level 200)
   Presenter: Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 8: Implementing Database Mirroring, Part 1 of 2 (Level 200)
   Presenter: Mark Wistrom, SQL Server Program Manager – Microsoft Corp., 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here

Session 9: Implementing Database Mirroring, Part 2 of 2 (Level 200)
   Presenter: Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com, 
   Session's corresponding blog entry, here.

Session 10: Recovering from Isolated Disasters and Human Error (Level 200)
   Presenter: Kimberly L. Tripp, SQLskills.com, 
   You're reading it! :-)

Recovery Models and Backup/Restore

  • MSDN Webcast Parts I and II cover Recovery Models and some issues/best practices related to changing recovery models. Check out the blog entry here which has links to the sessions and their associated blog entries.
  • MSPress Title: SQL Server 2000 High Availability, Chapter 9: Database Environment Basics for Recovery is here. The MSPress page for this title is here.
  • SQL Server Magazine Article on Isolated Disasters and Recovery (using RESTORE with STANDBY/STOPAT to investigate when a database became damaged) is here. Check out a consolidated list of all of my SQL Server Magazine Articles here and SQL Server Magazine here.

Table and Index Partitioning

RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0

There was a question that came up on this and the question basically asked – which is better. Well, this is a hard question to answer because they both have pro's and con's BUT before I get to the pro's/con's there's also another [more important] issue; these two get confused and swapped all the time. In fact, many vendors USED to refer to these interchangeably and even just lumped them together as RAID 10. Today, most people don't do this and most people also try to refer to the underlying technlogy instead of the numbers. Having said all of that, RAID 1+0 is Striped Mirrors and is my general recommendation because it tends to be more reliable than 0+1 and can tolerate more drive failures than 0+1. RAID 0+1 is Mirrored Stripes – which generally outperforms RAID 1+0 but cannot tolerate the loss of more than one drive and because of that it's more vulnerable. In the end, I'd suggest a simple "educational" site here (it's on a commercial site but it has a nice – and short – description of the different types of RAID arrays).

See you next week – for our LAST part in this series – Part 11: Best Practices in Building Robust, Recoverable, and Reliable Systems (Level 200).

Thanks for reading, listening and continuing to ask great questions!
kt

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