Hardware

Snapshots by Polaroid? That’s not right. You’re a DBA responsible for making sure SQL Server databases are online, backed up, corruption-free, and fast. Your databases have gradually grown in size over time, and you’re starting to hit new size issues you haven’t encountered before. Nightly maintenance windows are getting smaller, you’re not able to refresh…

You’ve heard these terms thrown around about storage, and you’re not sure what they mean, and how they relate to each other. Let’s make it simpler by using an analogy. Say you want to measure a shipping company. You’re trying to decide whether to use DHL, FedEx, UPS, or your local postal service. You could…

Storage sizing isn’t just about space: it’s about latency and throughput. When you move to new hardware or the cloud, and when you try to consolidate SQL Servers, you can’t just add up the database sizes and call it a day. Storage sizing isn’t just about space: it’s about latency and throughput. So how can…

Your users are complaining that their queries are slow. You’ve tried changing SQL Server settings, tuning indexes, but the problem just won’t go away. You’ve got a hunch that it’s a storage problem, but you need real, empirical proof. You need numbers that no one can argue, and you need to know acceptable targets for…

I bet you wanna know whether your storage is hot or not, and there’s no quicker, easier way to get a rough idea of your storage’s capabilities than to fire up CrystalDiskMark. This month, CrystalDiskMark released an all-new version 7, and it makes for even better testing. Start by downloading it and installing it –…

We’ve all had to move a database. For databases above a small size, this is a painful process. While there are a number of ways that you can move a database without downtime, they all involve a lot of extra work. What if there were something easier? Every database is unique and precious. What’s the…