Grant Fritchey

05Feb 2014 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Book Review: The Phoenix Project

Let's get this straight right up front, the thought of reading a novel that's about IT is so repellent, so repugnant, just so horribly wrong, that it's kind of hard to fathom why I would even attempt it. What's even more difficult for me to fathom is how much I enjoyed this book. Which is a novel. About IT. I can't figure it out. Maybe I need to start reading more IT novels... no. Let's hope that's not actually a thing. On with the review... The Phoenix Project is a story about a mid-level manager in a large company who has been running part of the IT organization that is a bit of a backwater, maintaining old big-iron systems, VAX, that type of thing. He gets called into the CEOs…

20Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 35 Comments

Time for a Quick Rant

Professional Development, SQL Server

This is an actual quote from what we can only assume is a functional human being: The database is very big so we stopped taking backup's. Eight lords a leaping are you kidding me? Seriously! Seriously? By the Great Gu and all the Valkyries in Valhalla, you stopped taking backups of your PRODUCTION database because it was "very big." And I'll put down Brobdingnagian stacks of cash that "very big" in this case is probably 200-500gb or at worst 1-2tb. People, assuming you have enough brain stem intact to regulate breathing, you must know, you must by all the sparkly vampires in Twighlight KNOW that you need to have backups. Right? I mean, nothing ever goes wrong on this shiny marble we call Dirt, does it? No one would EVER…

15Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 17 Comments

Database in Source Control

SQL Server, Tools

Many years ago, I was working with a great DBA. Seriously, a very smart and capable guy. He told me, "We need to put the database into source control, just like app code." And I just laughed. Not because I disagreed with him. I knew he was right, but I had tried, several times, to do just that. See, I'm not really a DBA. I'm a developer. I knew that code (and all the T-SQL that describes databases is code) needed to be versioned, sourced, tracked and audited. But great googly moogly, it was not an easy thing to do. I first tried just exporting the entire database into a script and then occasionally checking that script into source control. Yay! Mission Accomplished... Well, I had a database in source…

08Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 6 Comments

Sausage Making

Professional Development

For those who don't know, I work for Red Gate Software. I'm not a developer, but I work directly for the development teams so I spend a lot of time with them. This week I'm over in the UK, where they are headquartered, meeting with the different teams and discussing our products, their future, issues with them, enhancements, and all the rest. Suffice to say, I'm excited by the future. But the really fun bits are when you see behind the scenes stuff. Red Gate is pretty well known for polished, intelligent, elegant UI design (yes, they keep me away from that stuff). Behind those pretty pictures though is code. And our developers are just like your developers, smart, capable, skilled, but still learning. And it's those learning bits that…

03Jan 2014 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Speaker of the Month, January 2014

Professional Development

A whole new year. Cool. I was at SQL Saturday DC, #233, at the beginning of December. I sat through several really good presentations. I could honestly give the award this month to any of the ones I took notes on, but I have to pick one person (although, not always, my award, my rules). So, speaker of the month for the brand new year is Konstantin Melamud (li|t). Yet another speaker without a blog. Maybe I should enforce my own rules at some at some point. <sigh> Anyway, I enjoyed Konstantin's presentation. Let's talk about it. Performance Tuning - Index Optimization was an excellent presentation. Konstantin came at the topic very carefully. He started off with a knowledge level baseline, right at the start. I thought that was a…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…