20Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Tribal Awards: Vote Now!

Professional Development
The #tribalawards voting is now online. Get over there and get it done. I honestly don't care who you vote for because that is a great list of wonderful people in every single category. But if I were to pick one category, in which I'm nominated, that I'd like to win, it's Person You'd Like to Have a Beer With. So please at least consider making me happy. Then, next time I'm presenting in your area, we could share a frothy beverage and you can claim credit for my win which will result in my being forced to buy a round. See, it absolutely works out in your favor. But seriously, well, as serious as I can be when one of the categories is Best Karaoke, I think the people…
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19Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

How to Set Up Managed Backups in SQL Server 2014

Azure
Earlier this week I introduced the concept of Managed Backups (and caused less of a turmoil than I thought I would). Now I want to show you how it works. It's really simple and quite well documented. Before you get to the, insanely simple, task of actually enabling Managed Backup, you will need to go through the prerequisites. First, and this should be obvious, but I'll state it, just in case, you need to set up an Azure storage account. That's so insanely straight forward that I'm not going to say more. Then, you have to set up encryption on your system. I used these commands to prep it: CREATE MASTER KEY ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = '$qlserver2012queryperformancetuning'; CREATE CERTIFICATE CloudDojoCert WITH SUBJECT = 'Backup Encryption Certificate'; Again, shouldn't have to…
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18Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaking in 2014

Professional Development
I love that I get to travel around and learn from my #sqlfamily. We're still filling in the majority of the 2014 schedule, but the plans are to go to as many events as Mrs. Scary will let me. I'd like to alert you to a couple coming up in January, and then I should be able to get a fuller schedule for the first quarter posted soon (that way you can complain to me in person about Managed Backups). On Friday, January 10th, I'll be presenting a SQL in the City Seminar on Database Deployment in Cambridge, UK. Presenting in the UK is just fantastic. And this is a live event. And it's at the stately Red Gate Towers. Oh, and this is a free event, but seating is…
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17Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Introducing Managed Backups in SQL Server 2014

Azure
Some of the new functionality of 2014 is straight forward, non-controversial and easily welcomed by the community. Think, updateable column store indexes. Some of the new functionality is going to raise an eyebrow or three (most of the time, not on one person, but you know the #sqlfamily, we have some interesting mutations represented). Think... managed backups. Now, why on earth would a process that takes backups for you, including log backups, does it automatically per a schedule and/or when data has changed sufficiently, stores it offsite for protection and is easy to set up and maintain going to cause so much controversy? Hey, I'm wrong, it won't, move along... Or, maybe, I'm right, and this is going to raise more than eyebrows. We're talking about surrendering control over your…
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11Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

SQL Server 2014 Backup to URL

Azure, T-SQL
I'm absolutely in love with the concept of being able to create a backup directly to a protected, off-site location. Yeah, you can spend all sorts of money on terribly wonderful technology to enable that within your enterprise. And if you have that kind of money, great. But, what if you're like most everyone else and you just want a little more protection without mortgaging the house? Let's take a look at one possibility, backup to URL. There have been ways to backup to hosted storage, whether it was DropBox, AWS or Azure blob storage, for quite a while. But, every method I tried out involved setting up some type of drive on your system. As soon as you had your K:\ drive mapped out to AWS or whatever, you…
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06Dec 2013 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Speaker of the Month, December 2013

Professional Development
This will be my fifth speaker of the month post. Do a search to see the others. I try to find speakers that people may not have heard of who are out there, working hard, doing a good job. But, sometimes, I'm going to see a presentation by someone who is a community speaker, and... well, it just might stand out so much that I don't have a choice but to award them (remember, my contest, my rules, and the rules are utterly arbitrary). The speaker of the month is Ami Levin (b|t). The session I attended at SQL Saturday Dallas was called Physical Join Operators. It was all about hash match, loop and merge joins. Stop yawning. I'm into that sort of thing. What I expected was, hopefully, an…
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