I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Cephas Lin, of Microsoft, last year at the SQL Saturday in Indianapolis and then later at the PASS Summit in the fall.Cephas has been writing content for SQL Server 2012 Always On. Cephas has recently published his first whitepaper, a migration guide to SQL Server AlwaysOn. Read it and then pass along ...

If you're like me, you like for things to be semantically reliable.  Huh?  Said another way, I like for things to mean what they say and say what they mean.  Here are a few examples of I get annoyed by failed sematics - when a footpath is used almost entirely by cyclists, when an escalator is merely stairs, or when a restroom has a ...

One of the things that drives me crazy as I'm getting older is that my brain is losing the capacity to differentiate version numbers. As I speak travel around speaking with customers and at conferences, I find my self saying things like ''I can't recall if this problem was fixed in SQL Server 2000 or 2005. But you don't have to worry about that ...

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 in vivid detail the problems with sending compressed data into a de-duplicating appliance. And ...

This week I decided to focus on a few suggestions revolving around automation and making certain tasks easier to script or deploy. The first one that came to mind was a recent request from Nicholas Cain (blog | twitter), asking for a SCHEMA_ONLY backup option - to make moving a database *without* the data a much easier process: #660256 : Add ...

Or, How Mirroring Off-Site Saved my #Bacon My company does most things right. Our management is very supportive, listens and generally funds the technology that makes sense for the best interest of the organization. We have good redundancy, HA and disaster recovery in place that fit our objectives. Still, as they say, bad things can happen to ...

SQL Server 2005 added the STOPAT option for the RESTORE DATABASE command. This sounds great - we can stop at some point in time during the database backup process was running! Or? No, we can't. Here follows some tech stuff why not, and then what the option is really meant for: A database backup includes all used extents and also all log ...

I guess the title should be, ''You can't restore a SQL Server 2000 database on Denali.''  I had the occasion just today to recover some data from a backup I took way back in 2008 (!) for a colleague who was still on 2000 at that time (again, !).  When I tried to restore the backup on my local Denali instance, I received this error ...

Recently we've had to interview some SQL Server DBA candidates for our team, and we were looking for the type of open-ended technical questions that would draw out interviewees and let us get a sense of their thought process. A surprisingly simple question came up that seems to work well - it makes the candidate think through and explain ...

The SQL Server support team just announced the release of a backup simulator. Many 3rd party utilities that do backup like IBM Tivoli, Symantec BackupExec, Quest Litespeed, Redgate SQL Backup etc. use the sqlvdi.dll to communicate to SQL Server and this allows you to simulate that activity. So if you want to test how your system reacts or more ...