A special Video – Encryption Keys
By Patrick Townsend
Clear up some of the confusion about encryption with this online video by Patrick Townsend. He answers questions like, how do they work, and what do you need to know? Watch the Show
Q & A Responses
Today we have some responses to the questions from our editorial yesterday.
Should we use a naming convention for database servers, or instances?
Adam:
It’s in our nature to want to keep things in order. And define things with the move to cloud and service based systems, a naming convention seems less important.
The real trick is documenting it just enough to ensure others can understand the systems architecture. Eg the servers that make up the system.
The main thing i want to know out of a server name is whether it is prod or not prod.
🙂
Editor:
Did you know you can create an alias for an instance of SQL Server? I have worked in places where it makes sense to fire up multiple instances of SQL Server on a single operating system. The instance of SQL Server is known by the server name followed by the back slash, , and then a unique instance name on that server.
Using the SQL Server Configuration tool you can create an alias for any instance of SQL Server. The alias can be defined to use a specific network protocol, if using TCP/IP it can also specify a port, and of course you can specify the instance name. In this fashion you can define user friendly names for your instances of SQL Server.
I have only used this feature in a client mode. I am not sure if alias definitions may be defined and resolved on the server so you only have to define it in one place. That would be really cool if it works. I’ll try that tomorrow if nobody knows.
What monitoring tools would you suggest for a Systems Administrator with 3 servers and a budget of $2,000 USD?
Shannon:
I’ve rolled my own. I haven’t made many changes to it for the last 5 years but if you have the time to roll your own and validate that your data is meaningful, that can be really helpful. I use vb.net in a winform app to poll the server and store the data. The app also does some dbcc’s to gather data you can’t get from perfmon.
I store the data for a year and have a maintenance routine that clears data. There is almost no impact on the server if I keep the monitors reasonable. In my last job we moved to a virtual environment running on a SAN solution. Performance was awful. Having the data before virtual/SAN and after was very helpful. Using the data and months of “conversation” back and forth with IBM and we were finally able to get some things changed to help out the company’s performance issues.
Thanks for the replies. If you would like to add to our understanding please feel free to respond with your thoughts to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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