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How Many Days Can You Survive?

I saw a great post from DCAC on disaster plans and using them after a fire in an LA data center. DCAC wasn't affected, and I wouldn't expect them to be. Denny, Joey, Monica, John, Kerry, and Meagan are all experts in running systems efficiently and effectively. They think about how to ensure that things keep working in the event of disasters and have delivered presentations all over the world helping you become better at managing your own servers.

However, Denny brings up a great question in the post. How many days could you survive without IT systems? Days? Weeks? Have you ever been in that situation? I'm sure many of us have experienced a failure of some sort. An application crash, hardware dying, or most commonly, Internet access being cut. All of these are small disasters, which typically are fixed quickly. Hopefully, these aren't issues you experience every week. If you do, maybe you need to call DCAC or someone else and fix more fundamental issues.

While it's unlikely that you lose all your systems, it could happen if you concentrate your resources in one data center, one region, one cloud provider, etc. Having a single point of failure is something we try to avoid in IT, and that is true not just for one application, but for your infrastructure design. Most of us depend on one authentication system, and a failure of our Active Directory could lock everyone out of a system. Those are rare, and hopefully, your administrators have enough redundancy (and backups) to recover from this type of disaster.

I have experienced a few large failures at one enterprise. We had a few viruses, including the SQL Slammer worm in the early 2000s. Our network was shut down for a couple of days, when almost all systems from email to CRM to ticketing systems weren't available. Everyone had to use whatever paper systems they could to keep business running. While we likely lost some revenue from these outages, we learned we could survive a few days without our network. We also learned that we needed better virus scanning and education for employees, as well as a few more resources for tech people. Before those events, everyone assumed an outage was bad, but had no idea how bad. I have no idea how much this cost us, but it didn't appear in a 10-Q, so it must not have been too bad.

I think there are lots of businesses that could find ways to continue to work if some systems were down. However, there can be costs, sometimes significant. Even if the company doesn't go out of business, perhaps some people get terminated because of less revenue. That might not be the tech person in the short term, but how would you feel if your DR plan didn't work (or you didn't have one) and some co-workers were let go?

The move to the cloud, and the move to more software-as-a-service systems, might help you better survive local disasters, but if you have too many systems concentrated in one place, it is worth preparing for some contingency. After all, even if this fire were to happen in an Azure or AWS data center, it's possible that their process to move and restore all the systems from one data center to another could take time. Your systems might not even be their top priority as cloud vendors have some large customers. It probably won't take months, but I wouldn't want to bet my job on any cloud vendor getting everything moved in less than a week.

If you're not in the cloud, make sure you have a plan. If you don't know how to do that, call DCAC or another consultant to help you.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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A comparison of ChatGPT and the Bing Chat AI to see which one might be more useful for a user.

External Article

Flyway for SQL Server Data Tools Users

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If you are using SSDT for authoring, building, debugging, and publishing a database project, how do you change to, or preferably migrate towards, a Flyway-based database development? Flyway doesn't need to replace any code part of SSDT, but if allowed to manage every release candidate, it does allow for much cleaner branching, merging, and deployments.

External Article

How to Filter a SQL Server Audit with a Predicate

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

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Azure SQL Revealed

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Site Owners from SQLServerCentral

Access detailed content and examples on Azure SQL, a set of cloud services that allows for SQL Server to be deployed in the cloud. This book teaches the fundamentals of deployment, configuration, security, performance, and availability of Azure SQL from the perspective of these same tasks and capabilities in SQL Server. This distinct approach makes this book an ideal learning platform for readers familiar with SQL Server on-premises who want to migrate their skills toward providing cloud solutions to an enterprise market that is increasingly cloud-focused.

 

  Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

Refresh Limits

Can I use sp_refreshsqlmodule to check the metadata for CLR stored procedures and functions?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

  Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Contained AG Databases

Which system databases are included in a SQL Server 2022 Contained Availability Group?

Answer: master and msdb

Explanation: In a contained AG (Availability Group), the master and msdb databases are contained. Ref: What is a contained availability group? - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/contained-availability-groups-overview?view=sql-server-ver16

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.


SQL Server 2017 - Administration
Vulnerability Assessment removed? - In Brent Ozar's list of links today, I learned that Microsoft has removed the Vulnerability Assessment tool from SSMS as of v19.1. I recently started using it in my SQL Server environment and found it a great tool -- I was able to demonstrate to management why some of their security shortcuts were a bad […]
Best migration approach - Hi Colleagues, I am considering the across-the-wire migration method to SQL Server 2017. However, my source is an SQL Server 2014 Availability group with three nodes, one asynchronous. Is launching a new VM on the remote site and the same cluster to migrate this first node a good idea? Later, demote the old node, then […]
SQL Server 2017 - Development
Need help with a Query logic - I have a table which tracks of activity when users from one specific app login and logout. But I have seen some cases where let's say a user logins at 11:40 on March 24th and then logins again at 11:55 on the same day without logging out. The application doesn't allow that but I am […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
NOT LIKE Alternatives in WHERE clause - Hello, I need help to improve an existing (hence I cannot change table's structure nor the content's logic) WHERE clause, please. The table consists of returned products with their respective reason(s). In case there is more than one reason, they are concatenated. The request as shown in the mock-up below, has to retrieve a list […]
MS SQL Query - JOIN mutiple tables but it duplicates results - MS SQL Query - JOIN multiple tables but it duplicate results; Good day! it duplicate results when i run this query below;   - if i comment out "LEFT JOIN BBI$Barcodes AS BAR",  the query results are correct. Thank you!
Administration - SQL Server 2014
Database backups going to device - Hi Friends, How can I know the exact device where my backups are going on? I only see {67BAB2D0-A1DC-44F8-BF73-EBAFD5AE3220}16 as one device. However, I do not find out where are my backup files located. Some databases are going to a particular drive, but others are using that expression, Thank you, Best Regards,
SQL Server 2019 - Administration
Upgrading from 2016 to 2019 with Encryption - Hi, I have a few AWS EC2 instances currently running SQL Server 2016. I'd now like to upgrade these to SQL Server 2019 but the problem is that some of the data has been encrypted at the column level. I understand that, after SQL 2016, the encryption algorithm changed from SHA1 to SHA2. Would this […]
SQL Server 2019 - Development
Advanced SQL query help - Hi, I am looking for some help with two queries using the following table/data. It would be great to see the most efficient way to achieve these. Queries 1: Show all homes with rent above the average rent value for their Company 2: Show the number of homes registered 0-3 months, 4-6 months, 6-12 months, […]
MSSQL Service Broker DSQL operation on another database causing Broker failure - I have established a Service Broker configuration based on Eitan Blumin's excellent example. Advanced Service Broker Sample: Asynchronous Triggers I have crafted my own Stored Procedure. I can get the example to work when I'm performing activities within the same database. If I try to operate outside the current DB I get errors. I'm new […]
Extracting multiple fields from one column -     Hello, I have a situation. I am trying to show each  distinct event category, event action and event label from 'Hits' column and show the number of times each event occurred and the month that the event occurred– for labels containing “GNAV”. I am not sure why but something is wrong. Do you have […]
T-SQL Query Help - Hello, I am working on one of the SQL Logic, i need help to build core logic to do the rest, below is ddl, create table #x1 ( task varchar(100), subtask varchar(100), status varchar(100) ) insert into #x1 values ('a','x','completed') insert into #x1 values ('b','l','overdue') insert into #x1 values ('b','m','completed') insert into #x1 values ('b','n','not […]
SSIS package configuration connecting to design-time instance - I have an SSIS package which uses SQL Server Configurations. This uses an expression-based, project connection manager but is connecting to the instance at development time as opposed to the instance at run time. However the remainder of the package is using the run time version of the connection manager. The expression-based values come from […]
MSSQL STRING_AGG() Conversion failed when converting the varchar value to int. - Short story, I needed to convert a table insert/update trigger to a Service Broker task. That's not the issue but it might help explain the structures being used. The INSERTED table is used but is passed from the Trigger as XML variable to the SP and executed asynchronously under the Broker Service. Again this is […]
SQL Azure - Administration
Scheduled Jobs in Azure SQL Databases Failing for Auto-Paused DB - Hello! I have somewhat similar kind of PowerShell script which executes the stored procedure on a schedule. Since the database is set to auto-pause, job is failing at times with the error message below: "Exception calling "Open" with "0" argument(s): on server is not currently available. Please retry the connection later. " How can I […]
SQL Server 2022 - Administration
Allow only encrypted connections. - Hi In SQL22, Is there a way to allow only / force encrypted connections? I have 'force encryption' on and have cert installed:   But when I connect via SSMS I can unselect ' Encrypt Connection' and it connects. My understanding is that means that it is allowing non-encrypted connections: How do I make my […]
 

 

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