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The PASS Summit Approaches
According to Delta Air Lines, my outbound flights from Boston to Seattle (via Atlanta) for the SQL PASS Summit depart in 16 days. And I’m really excited about this. That’s all I have to say on the matter.
What I Do
Knowing that I’m putting myself on the job market, I was recently asked to describe what I do. As a DBA, I realize that every DBA’s job is different. So it was an interesting exercise to put together a few paragraphs explaining what my current role is. My company is rapidly growing. We’re in the [...]
Using RUNAS to Clear a Hurdle
Like most companies, mine has to contend with some form of regulatory compliance. In our particular case, it’s Sarbanes-Oxyley 404, better known as SOX. We have some network policies to enforce compliance with the implementation of SOX. One of those policies is that people with elevated access to key systems have a seperate account for [...]
Transitions
My current employer has made the decision to move to an Oracle-based ERP system. And the decision has been made to outsource DBA services. The only major system remaining on SQL Server will be Sharepoint. So my boss and I have agreed that I will be leaving at some point in the next six to [...]
SQL Saturday 71: My Slide Deck
I’m speaking at SQL Saturday today. Here is my slide deck. SQL Sat 71 Virtualization Success Story
When things work
I’ve mentioned in the past that our facility had some serious drawbacks during power outages. During our migration to our new facility and data center a few weeks ago, we lost power to the building. Again this morning, we lost building power. Let me tell you what happened. Our servers didn’t even blink. The UPS [...]
Looking for a Security Solution
We have some pretty strict security policies in my company. That often means coming up with creative solutions to problems. Hopefully someone in the DBA community can help me. We have a company that does some outside work for us. We have a database server at their location. We need to allow the database server [...]
Upgraded
I’ve just upgraded all three of my sites (this one, my personal site, and my Pug site) to the latest version of WordPress. Keeping current on your software is one more way to prevent getting hacked.
Moving System Files
Having built one database server in my new environment, the second one is an awful lot easier. The following six lines of code saved me a ton of time this morning. ALTER DATABASE [tempdb] MODIFY FILE (name = tempdev, FILENAME = ‘D:\TempDB\tempdb.mdf’) ALTER DATABASE [tempdb] MODIFY FILE (name = templog, FILENAME = ‘D:\TempDB\templog.ldf’) ALTER DATABASE [...]
Server Builds
I’m building a new server. Actually, I’m building two. We just bought a new pair of SANS (one production, one DR) and are doing a consolidation project with our databases. Each DB server will live on its own VMWare host. We’re virtualizing so that we can utilize VMWare’s clustering. It also gives us the flexibility [...]