Monthly Archives: December 2012
Moving On Up, To the Eastside
Yesterday was a good day, I was officially promoted to Senior Administrator late in the afternoon. Same job, a little more pay, but mainly recognition by my employer that they appreciate my performance. That is always a great feeling and a great way to start the weekend.
How will that change my day-to-day routine? It will not, except maybe that I will walk a little taller and have a bounce in my step. It is interesting to note that there have been rumblings of creating additional pay grades so that technical people like myself can advance further without going into management. However, if that does not happen then I have reached the proverbial glass ceiling as I prefer to be a DBA instead of a manager, to be honest.
I truly cannot see myself at the same pay grade for the rest of my career. Money isn’t everything, but raises on a regular basis say that you appreciate me and my work and that you value my performance. Always the optimist, I think everything will work out for the best, so no worries.
Enjoy your weekend!
Finalizing SQL Backup Assessment (Part 3)
After testing HyperBac yesterday in our SQL Backup tools series throughout this week, we realized that SQL Backup Pro is the way to go. The HyperBac compressed backups were not smaller than either SQL Server native compression or SQL Backup Pro. However, all three integrated well with our Ola Hallengren maintenance scripts. We also decided to do one native backup a week for disaster recovery purposes in case we cannot get the tool to work following a disaster. With a proprietary tool, my manager felt better in a DR scenario having at least one native backup, so ‘we gotta do what we gotta do’ to keep everyone happy.
I have recommended to Red Gate that they add more automation into the scheduling of Virtual Restore jobs to grab all of the databases in the job instead of individual jobs for each database. That I think is the only area I found to be lacking in the tool.
Enjoy your weekend.
Update on Backup Tool Testing (Part 2)
After a day of testing, we were able to integrate our Ola Hallengren solution with the Red Gate SQL Backup Pro v7.2 turning a SQL compressed backup on one database from 1.2 GB to 700 MB using compression level 4. This is a nice reduction for us with storage space being at a premium. Today we will be testing the SQL HyperBac solution.
All that was needed for Ola’s script was to add the following:
@Compress = ‘Y’,
@BackupSoftware = ‘SQLBACKUP’,
@CompressionLevel = 4
For HyperBac the settings would be:
@Compress = ‘Y’,
@BackupSoftware = ‘HYPERBAC’
Enjoy!
Backup Tool Testing Begins (Part 1)
Today we are beginning our testing phase for comparing the default SQL Server backup solution to the Red Gate HyperBac and SQL Backup Pro 7. We have already purchased Red Gate, but simply have not had the time to implement this tool. We did some initial testing, but it has been over a year and there is a newer version available now. We are curious how well this integrates with our ultimate maintenance plan by Ola Hallengren. Any input?
Miscellaneous Backup Notes
This week I have been teaching my understudy about backups and restores. Here are some important things we went over this week:
- Checking “Verify backup when finished” does not ensure that the backup is good.
- Checking “Perform checksum before writing to media” does not ensure the backup is good.
- Checking both 1 and 2 also does not ensure that the backup is good.
- Checking both 1 and 2 and performing a RESTORY VERIFYONLY does not ensure that the backup is good.
- The only way to ensure without a shadow of a doubt that a backup is good is using 1 and 2 and then restoring it somewhere else and running a DBCC CHECKDB on the database.
- Unless you are regularly restoring your backups you do not have a backup solution.
- If you switch from simple recovery mode to full recovery mode then you need to kick off a backup to start the chain.
- In full recovery mode (or bulk-logged recovery) you must backup the transaction log regularly enough to keep the log from filling up. This will truncate the log and allow you to provide point in time recovery. Mileage may vary with how often to perform this backup depending upon the size and requirements of your database.
- When using full recovery mode and you need an ad hoc backup make sure that you check the “Copy-only backup” so that you do not disrupt the backup chain by moving that backup to another location. You will screw up your recovery options at that point.
- In the full recovery model, using differential backups can reduce the number of log backups that you have to restore.
Enjoy!
Roll of the Dice
My wife and I are confronted within the next year with an interesting quandary. Come August, we will be empty-nesters at a young age. Our children will be either on their own or in college. This puts us in a unique position to move onto the next stage of our life. We still have around twenty years left in our professional careers, but where do we want to spend that? Do we stay in our beloved small town?
At this point, it does not look like our children will stick around to start families here so there is really nothing other than a lifetime of friends holding us to this town. We will however, keep our house and possibly move back here for retirement. Do we take the plunge and move somewhere totally outside of our comfort zones and reap the rewards. Do we live the life of nomads moving every couple of years to a new town just for the sake of new and exciting opportunities? We almost feel like high school seniors trying to pick the right college. What do you think?
Microsoft License Advisor
Looking to upgrade to SQL Server 2012 but you are not sure how much it costs or how the licensing works? Try the Microsoft License Advisor. Even if you are not upgrading, this is a fun little utility especially if you want to see what everyone else is paying. If you want some real fun look at what charities and academia pays for their licenses. Enjoy!
Windows 8
Setting up a windows 8 Lenovo laptop for my wife today. She forgot the password and now we are recovering the machine. There was never an option to setup the USB recovery setup when we created the password. Weird because she used the same password she always used and it had her hint in there. This reminds me of the fact that passwords are useless because I just recovered the whole machine on reboot. There could’ve been an email reset because the password itself is not that secure so why bother? I think security is so far behind in terms of evolution. Will someone just put the retina scanners or voice recognition on here and lets be done with it? Enjoy!
SQL Swampland 