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.” […]
I am speaking at the PASS Summit 2014
I am super excited to announce that I have been selected to speak at the 2014 PASS Summit. This is considered the Super Bowl of SQL Server Conferences. It is the worlds largest gathering of SQL minded nerds. Consider it a SQL Server Nerd Herd. Kidding aside it is the best opportunity to learn as […]
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 […]
Making a Difference – #SQLFamily
When I started with the SQL Community I was first encourage to start blogging which I started in Sept of 2010. While at the PASS Summit in 2010 I was encourage to submit to speak at a SQL Saturday. I submitted my first ever session for SQL Saturday #62 and got selected to speak. This […]
Using BMC Control-M to Automate Tasks
My largest client recently purchased BMC Control-M to use as our enterprise scheduler. Since this product went live in our environment I have been watching it displace other schedulers to become the centralized scheduler. As I have learned more about the capabilities of Control-M as well as becoming more alert to seeing references to the […]
The Primary Filegroup Cannot be Backed Up as a File Backup
File Group backups are great when working with very large databases (VLDB’s) that have been partitioned. Typically when I come across File Group backups implemented in production the database is using the full recovery model. With the full recovery model you can specify individual file groups for backup. A very common backup strategy for VLDB’s […]