Tag Archives: disaster recovery

A Double Dose of Trouble

Posted on October 13, 2017 by

It’s Friday the 13th, during the month of October. Halloween, a strange holiday associated with horrible events, and Friday the 13th, a bad luck day, are happening this month. Both are associated with horror movies, implying that this isn’t necessarily a good month for … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged | Leave a comment

Backup Plans for Data Loss

Posted on June 22, 2017 by

The British Airways computer failure has been on my mind for a few weeks. It seems like such an epic failure in 2017 from a high public company that many, many people depend on. I still struggle to believe the … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged ,

The Need for DRE

Posted on June 17, 2017 by

“Today’s database professionals must be engineers, not administrators” That’s a quote from an interview at O’Reilly on Database Reliability Engineering. I don’t want to quibble about whether those of us working in technology are engineers in name or not, but … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged , ,

A Bad First Day

Posted on June 14, 2017 by

I’ve started quite a few jobs throughout my career. In college, I worked in a variety of restaurants, changing employers at the start of every summer and again at the start of the school year. At some of those positions, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged

Big Power Issues

Posted on June 5, 2017 by

Recently British Airways had a massive computer failure and had to cancel hundreds of flights across a couple days. This was a large disruption for travel as tens of thousands of passengers were stranded around the world. In addition to … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged

The Quiet Zone

Posted on September 29, 2016 by

I’ve been in a data center when most servers turned off. I’ve actually heard dozens of systems powered off quickly, and it’s a strange sound. You become so used to the white noise of numerous fans that having them turned … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged ,

Data Loss or Downtime

Posted on July 10, 2015 by

This editorial was originally published on Jan 7, 2011. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation. I was watching Kimberly Tripp of SQL Skills talk recently about VLDB disasters and how to recover from them. One of the first things … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged

Two Days Off

Posted on January 8, 2015 by

I almost couldn’t believe this when I saw the article. The Verizon Cloud is shutting down for 48 hours. Apparently they have maintenance scheduled for this weekend and notified their customers that their virtual machines will be shut down early Saturday … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged ,

Test Your Situation

Posted on January 7, 2015 by

I gave a talk on Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) recently and a number of people in the audience were using the feature. However when I asked how many of them had restored a TDE database, not all hands remained up. … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged , , ,

Drop and Recreate

Posted on December 15, 2014 by

Those of you that manage replicated environments have learned to have one thing handy: a script that recreates your replicated publishers, distributors, and subscribers. I was reminded of my past needs for those scripts recently when I saw this post on … Continue reading →

Posted in Editorial | Tagged , ,