SQL PASS Summit 2011: Session Files This past week was the SQL PASS Summit 2011 in Seattle, WA. I presented three sessions (regular session, lightning talk, panel discussion) plus ran a focus group on advanced certification and hosted a Birds of a Feather lunch table on disaster recovery. It was a busy, busy week. Below…

T-SQL Tuesday #19 – Beyond Backups

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This blog entry is participating in T-SQL Tuesday #19, hosted this month by Allen Kinsel (Blog|@sqlinsaneo). You are invited to visit his blog to join the blog party. You are welcome to write your own participating blog post for the party or just to read more blogs participating in this month’s theme: Disasters & Recovery.

Any DBA worth his or her salt knows by now that they’d better have backups of their databases. I’m often surprised by just how many people aren’t backing up their system databases. I see a lot of people preparing for the loss of a database, but very few people preparing for the loss of the whole server. So what would you do if you lost a whole server? Restore user databases, and then what?

Part of the issue is that there are hundreds of DBAs espousing database backups, but very few talking about what else you need. don’t stop at database backups. You need to go beyond just backups.

These are some of the key things you could be losing if you do not back up your system databases and system configurations:

SQLU VLDB Week – Backups It’s day three of VLDB week at SQL University. Today’s lesson is on Backups. Very large databases have very large full backups. Very large backups have certain inherent problems. Disk space, disk performance, log file management, and time to complete a full backup all challenges faced with backing up a…

Multi-subnet Failover Clusters I want to take a closer look at one of the new features in SQL Server Denali. While everyone has been drooling over HADRON, another HA feature has gone mostly unnoticed. I haven’t heard anyone talking about it yet, so this should be an introduction to this new feature, Multi-subnet Failover Clusters….

What Does Redone Mean? Recently, I was honored by having a fellow DBA I’ve known for many years ask me to be his mentor. Earlier this week, he was reading a TechNet article by Paul Randal (blog | @PaulRandal) on Understanding Logging and Recovery in SQL Server. He didn’t quite understand what Paul meant by…