Since the start of the year we've been inundated with consulting and auditing requests, which is a good sign for the recovery from the economic effect on the IT industry over the last few years. Unfortunately Kimberly and I just don't scale, so while we've worked with many people this year on their SQL Server problems, [...]
Paul S. Randal
In Recovery...
Brent Ozar joining SQLskills.com
Posted on: June 29, 2010 6:00 am
Last call for Ireland SQL classes next week
Posted on: June 23, 2010 3:21 am
One of the places I really look forward to going every year is Dublin – not just for the countryside, friendly people, and our very good friends Carmel, Sandra, and Bob of Prodata, but also for the fabulous Irish breakfasts that the hotel serves – nowhere beats it, not even Scotland! And now that time [...]
Benchmarking: do multiple data files make a difference?
Posted on: June 22, 2010 6:45 am
Many times I'm asked whether having multiple data files can lead to an improvement in performance. The answer, as with all things SQL (except concerning auto-shrink) is a big, fat "it depends." It depends on what you're using the database for, and the layout of the files on the IO subsystem, and the IO subsystem [...]
Disaster recovery 101: hack-attach a damaged database
Posted on: June 18, 2010 12:11 pm
As a follow-up to my previous post Disaster recovery 101: backing up the tail of the log, I want to describe how to re-attach a damaged database if someone's detached it accidentally while performing disaster recovery. A couple of years ago I blogged a detailed post on Creating, detaching, re-attaching, and fixing a suspect database but now [...]
Disaster recovery 101: backing up the tail of the log
Posted on: June 18, 2010 9:21 am
One of the first things you should always check when a database has been damaged and you're going to perform a restore operation is whether you need to back up the tail of the log. The tail of the log contains the transaction log that's been generated since the most recent log backup was taken. If [...]
The Paul and Kimberly travel guide
Posted on: June 7, 2010 6:51 pm
Yesterday morning I was tagged in a blog post by my very good friend Buck Woody (twitter|blog), wondering how I travel (and by extension, how *we* travel, as I'm almost 100% of the time traveling with Kimberly). I think it might make for interesting reading for some of you who travel a lot too. Buck's [...]
Cool underwater videos of diving in the Cayman Islands – wrecks, octopus, turtles and more!
Posted on: June 6, 2010 11:27 am
A couple of weeks ago, Kimberly and I spent a week on the *excellent* live-aboard dive boat Cayman Aggressor IV, diving off Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brac in the Caribbean (diving is our #1 hobby and passion). The diving was absolutely fabulous, and we’d both strongly recommend the boat and location. The crew [...]
Whitepaper on high-availability architectures published
Posted on: June 4, 2010 11:00 am
The 20-page whitepaper I wrote this Spring for the SQL team has just been published. This whitepaper is titled Proven SQL Server Architectures for High Availability and Disaster Recovery and ties in with the longer whitepaper I wrote last year on High Availability with SQL Server 2008 (see here). This new whitepaper describes the five [...]
Presenting for PASS DBA virtual chapter June 9th
Posted on: June 3, 2010 10:06 am
Next Wednesday, June 9th, I'll be presenting at the monthly meeting of the PASS DBA virtual chapter. The Live Meeting starts at 11am PST and lasts for an hour (hopefully I can try to speak for that short a length of time :-) Title: Building the Right Backup Strategy Abstract: In many situations, database backups [...]
