Over the years I’ve been called in to work with numerous clients that were hit with ransomware. Even the times that the customer paid the ransom to unlock their encrypted files, there were still issues. Often times there were still issues with the files where they will not restore or data/log files can’t attach to […]
Category: Backups/Recovery
SQL Server Error 9002 – Full Transaction Log
A full transaction log can occur for a number of reasons. Typically it is due to the log not being truncated with regular transaction log backups, or something else not allowing the log to truncate. I often find Change Data Capture enabled and the jobs not running, SQL Server Replication in place and replication not […]
Msg 3140 – Could Not Adjust the Space Allocation for File
I often need to shrink database files. I know, ‘shrinking is bad’, however there are situations where it is very much needed. In my line of work, I come across databases that have been collecting data for year after year after year. One of the things I check for is the largest tables in databases. […]
Why You Need a SQL DBA or Consultant
Many organizations do not have in-house DBAs. This can be due to a number of reasons. Most commonly it is smaller organizations that cannot justify a full time DBA. Others are larger organizations that do more development work or organizations that run a lot of vendor supported software that don’t understand the value of having […]
Purging SQL Server Backup History
It seems like every few weeks I come across a database server with a very large msdb. After a small amount of investigation work, I determine that the largest tables consuming the most space are all related to backup history. I typically only keep 30 days of backup history but I’ve seen as little as […]
Why Test SQL Server Backups
For a lot of us data professional types, this seems like a silly topic, however I constantly hear of companies that aren’t testing their backups by restoring them, or don’t have proper backups at all.
There Is Insufficient Free Space on Disk Volume To Create the Database
I have been involved in countless database migrations. Most of the time I have access to the existing source servers and future destination servers. In cases where you have access to both environments, it is very easy to evaluate and clean up any issues with the source databases. In situations where you are only provided […]
Careful When Changing SQL Server Database File Extensions
I recently had a friend reach out to me about database performance dropping drastically. I asked if anything had changed recently on the server, and they told me that all they had done was increase the number of files for tempdb from 1 to 8 per best practice. Knowing that this shouldn’t have a negative impact […]