Data is the lifeblood of businesses, and protecting it is incredibly important. One of the ways DBAs help ensure the continuous availability of data is through database backups, a process involving copying the data and schema from a database and saving them elsewhere for retrieval later. But like any other process in IT, database backups have costs, benefits, and risks associated with them.

How do you know your SQL Server system is running well? Is it the simple method of noting no one is complaining? (Sadly, in many businesses, this is exactly how it's done.) The fact is, if you're not monitoring SQL Server performance, you don't know.

Recently, I wrote an article titled Life Cycle Monitoring: Why an Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of a Cure. The great Benjamin Franklin coined the term. In the article, I highlighted the value, efficiency, and logic of putting more time into a proper capacity planning and optimization process for all types of IT environments. Most IT professionals would tell you the first thing that comes to their mind when asked how they use log management tools is troubleshooting.

Consider this scenario. Pull up your bank’s website and find the screen showing how much money is in your bank account. It takes 30 seconds to return the balance. You’re a bit annoyed at not having your balance immediately, and upon reflection, you think it might be a bit low, and hit refresh in case you misread the number. It comes back 45 seconds later with a different number. You know you haven’t had any transactions in the last minute. Uh oh. Something’s not right.

For many federal employees, the workplace has shifted from a traditional office setting to being at home—in a kitchen, bedroom, basement, or any spare desk in the house. With a physical workplace transformation of this nature, cybersecurity concerns come to the forefront. While most agencies have been diligent in addressing these concerns, how has your agency planned to secure its physical inventory?

Silos in IT should be a construct of the past. Tight, rigid, and insulated IT silos were an unintentional design flaw of many IT organizations worldwide over the last few decades. Corporate teams would work on their respective piece of the puzzle in isolation, actively completing their tasks, but having little to no input or conversation on how their output contributed to the greater good. When you lay out the flow, it looks something like Figure 1.

Do you find yourself asking, “What should our first service-level objective (SLO)be?” The simplest way to get started if you have a website is to measure uptime SLOs. The SLO will measure your uptime and how your site compares to your reliability goals. By following the steps outlined here, you can get up and running with your first SLO in minutes. To get started, you’ll need to set up an account on SolarWinds® Pingdom®.

Data professionals—whether they’re database administrators (DBAs), developers, or data scientists—work in a wide and varied landscape usually in flux and filled with challenges. These challenges could range from changing business requirements to keeping up with the sheer velocity at which technology evolves.

In a previous post in the backup and restore series, How to Restore Databases From Native SQL Server Backups, Tim mentioned some more advanced options when restoring a database backup, including performing point-in-time recovery of a SQL Server database (sometimes known as PITR). In this tutorial, I’ll build on the information in Tim’s post by showing you how to use backups to perform point-in-time recovery and a more advanced way to determine an exact point to restore to.

December 7 started as a typical, but busy, pre-holiday weekday. This included a mix of booming online retail sales ($33.9 billion spent during cyber week), packages flooding delivery services, and high online traffic. But much of that quickly came to a crawl. An outage of the AWS us-east-1 cloud region changed the good fortune for many websites and applications and impacted the lives of consumers across the United States and parts of Europe.