Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Need for Tape

    This editorial was originally published on Mar 26, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is away at DevConnections.

    One of our SQLServerCentral authors sent me this post, which I found to be pretty amazing. Apparently hackers broke into a backup server at WebHostingTalk, which is a community for hosting providers to discuss issues. They deleted backups first, and then moved on to deleting tables from the database.  It resulted in some downtime, and then a restore of an old copy of their database prior to trying to restore more recent copies. More information from the admin is here.

    Now that’s just malicious and nasty.

    Hopefully this wasn’t an inside job, though I could see that as a possibility. For a service like this, that just provides a place for a community, let’s people interact and talk, this is just vandalism. It serves no purpose. It’s likely no one even knows it was “M@M@sB0Y” or some other hacker, so there’s no fame, and it disrupts people who just want to converse with colleagues.

    I’d hate to think about this happening here. We have lots, and lots of posts from people all over the world, and while it wouldn’t kill us, it would really annoy many people that have volunteered their valuable time to help others by losing their work. We definitely need to make sure we don’t have an issue here.

    I see two takeaways from this incident for most DBAs and administrators. First be sure that your backup servers are just as secure as your production ones. There is production data in the forum of backup files here, and you should be providing as much security for them, and perhaps more, as on other servers. Don’t treat these servers lightly.

    Second I think this shows that there’s a need for tape backups, or some type of non-linked backup. A tape grabs the files from your server, completely separately from the SQL Server (or other application). It is a pull link, and it’s not obvious from the source server where these files have gone. That’s good in that it prevents some type of attack on the main server from propagating on. Most people use a push from their server to a remote device as part of the backup process. That’s OK, but it provides an easy link for someone to attack the backup server from the main one.

    And one more benefit of tape? Usually they’re rotated out, so even if a hacker or insider knows how to get to the backup system, without physical access they can’t touch your tape.

    Steve Jones

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  • Common Problems with Backup and Recovery and How to Handle Them

    The basic concepts behind taking a backup are well understood, but people are frequently surprised by the many ways backups can go wrong. First, we’ll explore the most common problems around SQL Server backup and recovery, so that you can spot any issues in your own environment. Then, we’ll talk about how to prevent these issues in the first place. The foundation of disaster recovery is having a verified backup in place, so the knowledge you’ll gain from this session could help to save your business.

    We will look at issues with:

    • file backups
    • disk space
    • backup chain issues
    • full transaction logs
    • off-site storage
    • more

    Slides:

    SQL in the City – Common Backup Problems SitC_sj.pptx

     

  • Hybrid Databases

    SQL Server already handles hybrid data.

    We are dealing with more and more data all the time, and in more and more formats. As noted in this piece, companies are receiving data in new formats, from a variety of sources, and the traditional relational database isn’t always the best fit for the processing, storage, and management of the information.

    However SQL Server isn’t just a relational database. It handles unstructured data well, with the Filestream and Filetable enhancements to varbinary columns. We can even read into this unstructured data with iFilters that we install on our instances. In fact, I’ll be talking about these filters at DevConnections on Wednesday.

    SQL Server has StreamInsight for complex event processing, allowing you to handle very quick streams of data that could overwhelm your OLTP architecture.  If that’s not enough, there are connectors that allow you to integrate with other data processing architectures, like Hadoop.

    With all the various subsystems like SSIS (ETL), Reporting Services (exports to other formats), Service Broker (messaging), spatial data, and more, I think SQL Server is an amazing hybrid database platform in and of itself, without any extra charges for the various features (like some other platforms). That’s not to say you shouldn’t use any other platfoms. If they work, use them and integrate with SQL Server, but if you don’t have other databases in place, I’m not sure you need to look past SQL Server for many of your needs.

  • Best Practices for Database Deployment

    The easiest part of any deployment is running the deployment script on production. But what have you done to prepare that script for production? Was the script tested? Is the script tightly coupled with the application code?

    The difference between a successful deployment and a failed or problematic deployment is all the preparation work you’ve done to ensure that you’re deploying the right script, the right way to your production environment. This session will explore best practices that you can implement to ensure that your deployments are as successful as they can be.

    Slides: