In this survey I'd like to find out what kind of disaster recovery guide/run-book/plan you have, if any. When a disaster occurs, do you just wing-it, or is there something written-down that was worked out in advance to help you along the way. I'll report on the results in a couple of weeks. *Please* no comments [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
Survey: what kind of disaster recovery guide do you have?
Posted on: August 26, 2009 1:50 pm
Adding geo-redundancy to failover clustering
Posted on: August 26, 2009 12:07 pm
A few weeks ago I kicked off a survey on how you add geo-redundancy to a failover cluster (see here for the survey). The results as of 8/26/09 are as follows: So why is this interesting? Well, many people will suggest failover clustering as the best way to provide high-availability for a database (or [...]
SQL Server 2008 R2 bumps the database version
Posted on: August 25, 2009 11:35 am
(Be sure to join our community to get our monthly newsletter with exclusive content, advance notice of classes with discount codes, and other SQL Server goodies!) SQL Server 2008 R2 has been out for a while now (see http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/R2.aspx) and many people are trying it out. One word of caution: any database attached to a [...]
Don’t confuse error 823 and error 832
Posted on: August 24, 2009 5:30 pm
I was reading a thread on SQL Server Central today where someone replied to a question and confused 823 with 832. Now, 823 is a nasty error to get – it says that an I/O operation failed at the OS level and the I/O subsystem is causing corruption – SQL Server didn't even get a [...]
Birds, beasts, and boats in rural Texas
Posted on: August 24, 2009 4:50 pm
This week we're back down in Houston with a client and had a spare day so we decided to do the loop from Houston down to the Bolivar Peninsula and around through Galveston. You can see some photos from our previous trip here a couple of months ago in the post Bird watching on the [...]
SQL Quiz #5: SANs and mirroring
Posted on: August 21, 2009 7:18 pm
There's another SQL Quiz (from Chris Shaw) doing the rounds where people blog the answer and then tag someone. This I got tagged by two people (Jason Massie and Gail Shaw) in the same day for the same quiz (albeit over a week ago). They either think I'm going to say something profound or funny, [...]
Goals, obsessions, and aspirations: becoming an MVP
Posted on: August 21, 2009 10:01 am
Several times this week I've been asked about how to become an MVP. A few people have posted on this, but here's my take. I think basically what it comes down to is that if you aspire to become something you're not already, you usually need to make changes in your life. Sometimes significant changes. But [...]
CHECKDB From Every Angle: How to tell if data purity checks will be run?
Posted on: August 19, 2009 11:04 am
Here's a question that came up recently: if I've upgraded a database from SQL 2000 or before, how can I tell if the data purity checks will be run or not? As you may know, DBCC CHECKDB in 2005 onwards includes 'data purity' checks. These look for column values where the value is outside the [...]
Fall line-up of classes and conferences
Posted on: August 19, 2009 10:53 am
We've finally nailed down the dates for all our Fall classes and conferences around the world. Here's the plan: September 21-25. Kimberly and I will be teaching a week-long Immersion Event in Dublin, Ireland - combining internals, performance tuning, database maintenance and more. September 29-30. Kimberly and I will be presenting a full day of SQL Server sessions [...]
How are auto-created column statistics names generated?
Posted on: August 14, 2009 7:42 am
This is a question that came up at the Cleveland SQL Server User Group last night. An attendee had a wager with his colleagues about how the names of auto-created column-level stats are generated. Let's find out. I'm going to create a table without any indexes and then do some queries. USE master; GO CREATE [...]
Forwarding and forwarded records, and the back-pointer size
Posted on: August 10, 2009 10:53 am
This is a question that comes up every so often, most recently this morning while teaching a private class (and Kimberly's teaching now): how large is the forwarded record back-pointer? (And I haven't posted anything geeky for a while…) In a heap it is possible to get forwarding and forwarded records. They occur when a [...]
Comments are moderated now
Posted on: August 10, 2009 9:21 am
Thanks to the attention of some scurrilous parasites, all comments will now be moderated. And to said parasites, please be aware that there's no point spamming my blog with comments linking to your websites as no-one will ever see them now. And I've contacted your hosting companies with your IP addresses, and a copy of [...]
Cleveland river tour
Posted on: August 9, 2009 5:11 pm
This week we're in Cleveland teaching on-site for a private client. We came a day early to recover from the journey and see some of Cleveland's sights – neither of us having been here before. Kimberly's foot is still very sore and so we decided to do something where she could sit still and not [...]
Survey: How do you provide geo-redundancy with clustering?
Posted on: August 3, 2009 2:59 pm
I'm moving away from strictly weekly surveys as they're a little demanding, especially when we're on the road. In this survey I'd like to know which technology you use to provide geo-redundancy to databases that are protected locally using a failover cluster. I'll report on the answers sometime around the middle of August. *Please* no comments [...]
Importance of running regular consistency checks
Posted on: August 3, 2009 7:19 am
A long time ago, in a blog post far, far away (well before I went offline in July) I kicked off a weekly survey about how often you run consistency checks (see here for the survey). Now I'm back online again, and so here are the results as of 8/3/09. The results are actually [...]
