4 Things I Wish I Knew Sooner

I was recently called out by Tim Costello on a blog series started by Mike Walsh.  http://www.interworks.com/blogs/tcostello/2014/08/27/4-things-i-wish-i-knew-sooner-bi-consultant The series calls for each blogger to list 4 things they wish they had known sooner in their career as a data geek. 1) Knowing how to query data != DBA. You will be insulted. There is a […]

An error occurred while executing batch. Error message is: Arithmetic Overflow

Recently an incident came across my desk where an end user was receiving an error trying to retrieve some records from the database. The error message the customer received was “An error occurred while executing batch. Error message is: Arithmetic Overflow”. Experience has taught me that this message is related to an invalid dataset within a […]

Microsoft SQL Server “Most Valuable Professional” MVP

Today I received an email notifying me that I have been awarded the Microsoft “MVP” award. An excerpt from Microsoft’s website states “The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is our way of saying thank you to exceptional, independent community leaders who share their passion, technical expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others.” […]

SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options

Working with Microsoft SQL Server for many years I have spent a lot of time discussing the importance of the availability of SQL Server databases.  Questions that always come up when discussing availability of the data is “Recovery Time Objective – RTO” and “Recovery Point Objective – RPO”.  Both questions are very important when determining […]

Know Backups and Know Restores – SQL Server Restores

A couple of years ago I put together a training session to demonstrate various types of backups and restores. The driving factor behind me building this session was the response I got from talking to a dozen or so DBA’s about disaster recovery. I asked how many have ever performed a restore where you had to […]