Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Thom Coats of The Unstuck Business Academy for their “Stories from the C|Suite” podcast. Thom is a wonderful host and we had a lot of fun talking about everything from camping and hiking, to professional development, to effectively managing SQL Server infrastructures. Here’s a…
Read more
Many companies have lean IT organizations and find themselves with five, ten, or even twenty production SQL Servers and no dedicated Database Administrator to care for them. Instead, they rely on other IT Professionals to ensure the database servers are performant. We’ve worked with many companies where SysAdmins, Application Developers, and Network Administrators have been…
Read more
Installing SQL Server is surprisingly easy. Download the media, double-click the setup file, answer a few configuration questions, and in less than 15 minutes you have a fully functional database server. And the server performs well. For a while. Then it slows down and maybe even a database corrupts. You recover by restoring the prior…
Read more
As of July 9, 2019, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 have officially passed from Extended Support to No Longer Supported. What does that mean? It means that Microsoft will no longer release any updates for any version of SQL Server 2008. That includes security patches and data integrity fixes. If a hacker…
Read more
We’re frequently asked how many tempdb files a SQL Server should have, especially from those who have downloaded our free 5 Common SQL Server Configuration Issues PDF. That’s because there’s a lot of well-intended but incorrect information posted on the internet about tempdb. What Is tempdb? Let’s start with a very brief description of tempdb. When SQL…
Read more
Ding! Your desktop IM client chimes. “Any idea how long my SQL Server backup/restore will take to complete? I think it may be stuck.” Someone has started a database restore (or backup) using a T-SQL command. Now he wants to know how long the process will take to complete. He’s gone to the bathroom and…
Read more
“Should I install SQL Server 2017 now? Or wait until SQL Server 2019?” One of our Remote DBA clients recently asked me that question. They have a set of aging SQL Server 2008 R2 instances used for production, test, and development. SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 Extended Support ends July 9, 2019, and the…
Read more
Just when we thought that most cybersecurity attacks came via social engineering, we see this. Attacks on IIS, Microsoft’s web server, increased from 2,000 in Q1 2018 to over 1.7 million in Q2 2018. That’s a mind-boggling 782x increase! This is according to an esentire Security Advisory released last week. Hackers go-to tool of choice? PowerShell was the most commonly…
Read more
How much data can a DBA manage? According to a 2010 Forrester Research article, it’s around 5 TB of data. Since that article was written, the amount of data companies collect and store has exploded so I suspect the figure today is closer to 10 TB of data. Of course, that’s painting with broad strokes…
Read more
Today’s Braves fans have it easy. When I was a kid, being a Braves fan was hard. It was a character building experience. Young Braves fans in the 1970’s learned to become optimists and to see the silver lining in even the darkest of clouds. We had to. The team didn’t give us much to…
Read more
Recent Comments