So after five and a bit years of being an IT Manager here is some advice I have learned along the way in no particular order. On the whole I have enjoyed myself but it has been a real challenge at times. 1. Figure out what plates are still spinning Being an IT Manager is all about keeping everything running all of the...
Like many DBAs I spend a lot of time maintaining my SQL Server backups. From SQL Server I maintain both full backups and transaction log backups. I have often restored my full backups but until recently I have never restored a transaction log backup. All backup strategy’s are only as good as the last time you tested...
I recently read a blog post by Pinal Dave about how you can backup straight to Azure Storage. The procedure he described is only available for SQL Server 2014 or later. I won’t go into detail of this method as Pinal describes it better than I can, but the basic of it requires setting up credentials and then running a...
For the past few months I have been deploying changes to my companies database every couple of weeks or so. Over a weekend when the database was not being used I would make a backup of the database, load up visual studio, deploy the database changes and copy a couple of front-end files. My weekends and evenings have...
I recently saw this blog post by Brent Ozar that I thought I might discuss. Brent listed 13 questions to ask about a database before you start working with it. I am going to go through these 13 questions and expand on them based on my experiences. Is this database in production now? I think it should go without saying...
Today is my day off, but I wake up and have a quick look at nagios to see if there is anything I need to worry about. Yes there is, SQL Server has run out of disk space on its data disk. I race downstairs and VPN onto the server to find out what has happened. One of my monitoring databases has had runaway log growth...