DBInsight’s Blogs

Moving a SQL Cluster using Log Shipping
Posted by Rob Risetto on June 20, 2014

I recently had the requirement to configure log shipping in a SQL 2008 R2 Standard Edition environment. In my scenario, we needed to move a two node cluster to another floor but also attach it to a new SAN, have minimal downtime, no data loss and use the current server hardware.

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SSIS Deployment Changes in SQL Server 2012
Posted by Rob Risetto on May 23, 2014

If you are a developer of SSIS packages then this article (here) will give you a good run down on the SSIS package deployment improvements in SQL Server 2012. These improvements will definitely make your life easier in deploying SSIS packages to multiple servers and environments.

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Free SQL Server Management Tool
Posted by Rob Risetto on May 03, 2014

The SQL Server 2012 Performance Dashboard is a free tool from Microsoft and assists in viewing the health and status of your SQL Server instance. It even works on SQL Server 2008. You can download it from (here).

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SQL Server 2014 is Coming!
Posted by Rob Risetto on April 21, 2014

Well not quite yet but the CTP1 (here) is out so you can download it and have a play. Some big changes are on the way including the In-Memory OLTP engine, ability create to Asynchronous Availability Groups to the Azure

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Understanding PowerPivot and PowerView in Excel 2013
Posted by Rob Risetto on April 01, 2014

The Self-Service Business Intelligence (BI) paradigm has be around since SQL Server 2008, and now SQL Server 2012 and Excel 2013 have provided even more enhancements and sweeteners for BI enthusiasts.

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Is Corporate BI Dead?
Posted by Rob Risetto on March 22, 2014

I’ve been following a number of threads featuring Self-Service BI vs. Corporate BI discussions. Some BI proponents are suggesting that Corporate BI is dead and that Self-Service BI, driven by the enhanced front-end products like of Excel 2013, PowerView, PowerPivot, are now making Corporate BI redundant.

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Log Shipping Lite with Powershell – Free tool of the week
Posted by Rob Risetto on March 01, 2014

Here’s an article (here) on the implementing a log shipping solution using Powershell scripts. This article is from SQL Server Central, so you will need to register on the site to log in.

Anyway the article suggests this solution comes into play when you are constrained by

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Cloud Based SQL Monitoring for On-Premise and Cloud based SQL Servers
Posted by Rob Risetto on February 20, 2014

Traditional monitoring tools find it difficult to securely monitor the On-premise and Cloud based SQL Servers. The DBAs typically need to run multiple monitoring tools that are not integrated and are disparate in functionality and reporting. In addition, monitoring infrastructure needs to be deployed into multiple sites and DBAs need to be trained to support multiple monitoring tools.

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Anyone going to the Cloud
Posted by Rob Risetto on February 10, 2014

The trend that I’m seeing with my customers is that there is now a willingness to consider the Cloud for the deployment of mainstream database applications, especially if it’s a green fields project. In fact, some of my customers have already made the move and have deployed multiple SQL Servers in Amazon AWS and have

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Improve the Restore Performance on AWS
Posted by Rob Risetto on January 20, 2014

Following on from my backup performance post, the next challenge was trying to restore a backup on the mirrored server within a reasonable time. In this case, a reasonable time was 3 to 4 hours as opposed to 12+ hours. Again the issue we faced on AWS was the 39 MB/sec throughput limit per high

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