Amazon AWS

Amazon AWS Editorials SQL Server

Cloud Services a Commodity?

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 […]

Administration Amazon AWS Azure Azure SQL Database Community Editorials Encryption/Data Security

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, […]

Amazon AWS Amazon RDS Azure Azure SQL Database Editorials SQL Server

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. […]

Amazon AWS Amazon RDS Editorials

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 […]

Administration Amazon AWS Amazon RDS Azure Azure SQL Database Editorials

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 […]

Administration Amazon AWS Azure Editorials Ethics Security

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 […]

Amazon AWS Azure Editorials

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 […]