Archive for September, 2009
Lessons Learned: When the Lights Go Out
Several years ago, when my company moved into our current building, some decisions were made at a level over my boss’ head. We have UPS power in our server rooms, but we don’t have standby generators for the building. At the time, it was deemed too expensive. This morning, that decision came back to bite [...]
Lesson Learned: Only Restoring WHERE you want
As a DBA, my job is to protect the company’s data at all costs. But what happens when it’s the DBA who causes data loss? I wrote about this a couple of years ago when I accidentally restored a backup copy on a production instance. One of the things I do on a regular basis [...]
Lesson Learned: Why is my tlog backup huge at 5AM?
As a DBA, I find myself learning new things all of the time. I was looking at the transaction log backups of one of my servers recently and saw something incredibly odd. Most of my transaction log backups are in tens of megabytes. But the backup at 5:00 AM was averaging about a gigabyte. This [...]
An Example of Bad Design
What’s a little extra padding? And I’m not talking about my waist line here. Today, I want to talk about one of my pet peeves of a current system. I know I keep beating up on this one table that’s really poorly named. It holds customer orders and the vendor has decided to call it [...]
The Rules
I’m somebody who believes in absolutes. My old boss used to tell me that I saw the world in terms of black and white while ignoring the gray. He’s probably right. I think being anal-retentive about things makes me a better DBA. There are a few rules that I believe in and don’t like to [...]
Dear Vendor
A lot of application vendors try to do things that will make managing their application easier for customers who lack an IT staff. I seriously doubt they make it that much easier. Unfortunately, there is something called unintended consequences, and they frequently make their applications harder for those of us with an IT staff (especially [...]
Crystal Reports Formula for MSDB Dates and Times
As a DBA, I find myself spelunking through data and often having to present it in a somewhat human-friendly format. This is where my skills with Crystal Reports come in quite handy. I joke that I’m a Crystal Reports Jedi Master. Truth be told, I’ve just been working with the product entirely way too long. [...]
Letting SQL Server Do Your Scheduling
My friend Brent Ozar recently said that “Schedulers belong in applications, not databases.” He has a perfectly valid point. I’d like to offer another side to that opinion. My previous employment had me working as a database administrator in a small environment. We had 700 users running 7 key business applications, all run on a [...]
A World without Ambiguous Column Names
I mentioned naming standards in a previous post. Several years ago, I was doing report development on a project implementation team, and I worked with a naming convention that still fascinates me. Every table had an alias. There was a table that stored all of these alias names, as well. Let me give an example: [...]
Backing Up for my Primary/Secondary Environments
Every environment is different, and that means everyone does backups differently. I thought I’d talk about how I do it in my environment. For most of our key business applications, we have two sets of servers, a primary and secondary. The secondary servers are in a different data center. Fortunately, bandwidth isn’t a problem. I [...]