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Passionately curious about Data, Databases and Systems Complexity. Data is ubiquitous, the database universe is dichotomous (structured and unstructured), expanding and complex. Find my Database Research at SQLToolkit.co.uk . Microsoft Data Platform MVP

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing" Einstein



Showing posts with label Database Administration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Database Administration. Show all posts

Monday, 12 December 2016

Data past, data present and data future

Database and data management practices are changing and new practices need to be adaptive and agile. Here are a few data thoughts for data past, data present and data future.



















Data of Christmas Past
  •  Reports and dashboards have become standard place within the business. 
  •  Big data is just the new look of data.
  • DevOps has become mainstream.
Data of Christmas Present
  • There is an increasing plethora of database architecture designs to choose from which means selecting the right design and database engine for the right job is harder than before.
  • Business is driving the need for data. 
  • Best practice delivery is hard in a fast changing environment. 
  • Complexity is increasing in a diverse landscape.
Data of Christmas Yet to Come 
  • The face of database administration is changing with multiple of types of engines, tools, applications and cloud offerings. 
  •  It is necessary to have broad range of database knowledge to ensure best practice configurations are deployed for the plethora of tools.  
  • Predicative analytics are becoming critical for business. 
  • Deep learning utilizes machine learning to model data at high levels of abstraction which will transform how we live.
  • Research is starting to become embedded in industry with the need to drive the next innovation.

Thursday, 3 July 2014

Mainstream Support Ends


Mainstream Support for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 will end on  8 July 2014.  The definition of Mainstream support is shown in this table. 


Taken from http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle


Sunday, 15 September 2013

Automation for Testing the Quality of Database Backups



The testing of SQL backup restores is a critical task for the Database Administrator and the backups are only ever as good as the last backup that was tested. A standard process for this could look like

  • Recovery of backup files from storage media
  • Restoration of the database backup
  • Checking the integrity of the backup using DBCC CHECKDB 
  • Inspect the output for corruption.

Some useful articles to help automate this process are;

Backup Verification, Statistical Sampling, And You
http://shaunjstuart.com/archive/2011/09/backup-verification-statistical-sampling-and-you/

Statistical Sampling for Verifying Database Backups
https://www.simple-talk.com/content/article.aspx?article=1028

Sample size calculator
http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html

To completely automate a backup testing routine that scales as the database population varies is an excellent addition to your toolbox.

Monday, 1 July 2013

Database Landscape Map



The latest visualization of the number of  databases in the market place by 451 Group. This is an interesting graphic showing the vast number of database engines in the database space at the current time. The graphic can be found here

http://blogs.the451group.com/information_management/2013/06/10/updated-database-landscape-map-june-2013/