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• New Project Starting. Got Gas?

  “Storage is just like gasoline,” said a fellow DBA at the office the other day. This DBA, Mike is his name, is one of the smartest people I know, so I pressed him, in my subtle and erudite way, to elaborate. “Um, whut?” I said. “Yeah. Now that everything Read More... Posted Monday, September 10, 2012 1:32 PM by merrillaldrich | 4 Comments Filed under: san, Storage Design, virtualization

• Scandalous II: Shh! I am De-duplicating Compressed Backups

  This is part II of two Scandalous posts . Watch, mouth agape, as I run with scissors, right up against prevailing wisdom! Unfollow me now, before it’s too late! Here’s the thing. There are two really outstanding posts out there on the ‘tubez that explain Read More... Posted Friday, April 22, 2011 11:01 PM by merrillaldrich | 8 Comments Filed under: backup, disaster recovery, Dukes of Hazzard, san, Storage Design

• POSH-y SQL Disk Space Monitoring

  In a prior post I expressed my dismay that apparently Operations Manager (which I dig in other respects) has no love for SQL Server storage that uses mount points. Herewith, henceforth, forthwith is a PowerShell workaround I am using until I find out Read More... Posted Tuesday, January 04, 2011 11:46 PM by merrillaldrich | 1 Comments Filed under: monitoring, SCOM, Storage Design

• T-SQL Tuesday #004: Real World SSD’s

  A contribution for T-SQL Tuesday #004 , hosted by the illustrious Mike Walsh! In the past few weeks I had some correspondence with Kendal Van Dyke leading up to his SQL Saturday presentation on SSDs, and he got me fired up to share a little of my team’s Read More... Posted Monday, March 08, 2010 9:22 PM by merrillaldrich | 4 Comments Filed under: performance, san, Solid State Disks, Storage Design

• SAN 101 for the DBA

  As will become apparent from this post, I am no Storage Admin. My apologies for offending the sensibilities of those who know this topic better than I do! I get asked occasionally about placing SQL Server data on SAN storage, and I've done it with a few Read More... Posted Tuesday, February 16, 2010 3:45 PM by merrillaldrich | 1 Comments Filed under: performance, san, Storage Design

• New Toys (Ho! Ho! Ho!)

  So, I am just writing because I am excited about some new toys we're setting up at work: I've got three new Nehalem-based SQL servers connected to our first storage array with solid state disks (it actually has three tiers of storage: SSD, FC and SATA). Read More... Posted Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:28 AM by merrillaldrich | 0 Comments Filed under: Solid State Disks, Storage Design

• Choices in physical storage design – EAV Case Study

  Partitioning for Fun and Profit Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with a toy SQL monitoring application, just to sharpen my dev skills a bit. Part of the app is a SQL database to store historical performance data, in order to do trending. Fooling Read More... Posted Monday, November 23, 2009 5:30 PM by merrillaldrich | 0 Comments Filed under: performance, Storage Design