We have a number of services that are hosted with cloud providers – from this site’s hosting to our virtual event platform and others, it’s interesting to see cloud evolve and provide some killer support for deploying cool solutions. One of the things that we’ve been seeing more and more though is a “yeah, us too!” type of approach to […]
Amazon AWS
Interesting: Data Bread Lines
In reading through a post about a book that’s out about managing and living with data, there were some very interesting observations outlined. Things that are pretty apparent as you work through systems at companies with many different sources of information and raw data. The post was a book excerpt, from “Winning With Data” (Wiley). If you think about it, […]
SQL Server RAT in the mix.
The creativity of some hackers and malicious actors is just amazing. There is a new bit of malware out there now that highlights some new approaches that I think we’ll start to see more of, and at the same time, incorporates SQL Server, which (at least since some infamous older issues) hasn’t been the specific key component of issues for […]
SQL Server instance growth, management
I was reading an interesting article in DBTA (April/May 2018, “The Headaches of Microsoft SQL Server Sprawl“) and it was clear that so many of us are facing some pretty significant challenges when it comes to managing SQL Server instances. Particularly true if you consider “SQL Server instances” to include your Azure instances and/or managed instances on Azure and AWS. […]
Did you know there is additional reporting available? (SQL Server RDS)
DBAs are all about transparency – transparency hopefully about what’s going on with the SQL server. Things like connections and utilization and all of that. You have many standard tools that monitor and analyze your SQL Server, but you also have access to other tools native to the AWS platform. It’s surprising the granularity you can drop down into […]
Planning that next platform upgrade or migration
Completing a migration, whether it’s for version-to-version migration or for platform updates or even moving to a cloud-based solution from an on-premises solution, is a major project. Even a sideways version swap, accompanied by a platform change can mean all sorts of things in terms of settings, features, capabilities that may have to be modified, for sure have to be […]
Beware the dark side of capacity
When you’re working with resources that are dedicated instances, powerful instances, you can get caught up a bit in the fact that it can take a lot more to trip up those resources than perhaps you’re used to. It’s sort of like flying as the only passenger in an airplane made for commercial flight; there is likely a lot more […]
Using Throw-Away Databases, Tables
We’ve been doing some work with a few different database systems that are supported on the different cloud platforms – work where we’re using the databases as either a pre-processing or holding-zone for data that isn’t quite yet ready to be fed into the overall scheme of things for the customers. It was an odd realization that with many of […]
Critical Data Recovery is Multi-Faceted
Yesterday, the post was about cyber-attack recovery. Talking about the need for a more comprehensive recovery mechanism and approach than just “restore to the most recent backup.” As mentioned, this also applies to failover systems. In many cases, people will put in failover systems (or cloud-based services that are highly unlikely to go down) and figure they’re covered. But the […]
Handling Downtime and the Cloud
Yes, it happens. Things happen, systems fail, someone trips over a cable (hopefully not so much these days in major data centers), etc. What has struck me though is that your options for dealing with downtime when you’re hosting (and it doesn’t matter if it’s “stretch” services or hybrid or entirely cloud) in these types of services, are limited. If […]