Brandon Leach
Microsoft Data Platform MVP
Chicago, Illinois, United States
A Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Brandon is a senior member of the Database team for financial company x functioning as a SQL Server Infrastructure Architect/SME. Having worked in data estates of several petabytes across thousands of servers, he puts a high focus on performance tuning and automation at scale. He is a frequent speaker at events like conferences and user groups.
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Surviving The Hordes Of Chaos: Introduction to SQL Server HA/DR Architecture
In a 24/7 world, minimizing downtime and protecting against total disaster is an absolute must. In this session, we will take a high-level look at the various high-availability and disaster recovery options in SQL Server to protect our systems. We will look at their pros and cons, and discuss the basics of business continuity. Finally, we will look at how to choose the right technologies to meet the needs of your organization best.
CheckDB like a pro
As DBAs, integrity checks are one of our most crucial responsibilities. However, as databases grow in size it can become harder to fit integrity checks into our maintenance windows. As a result, it is sadly not uncommon to find them not being run regularly.
In this session, we will discuss how CheckDB works and how we can use the options available to us to create a strategy around integrity checks to ensure that we can fit them into our maintenance windows. Specifically, we will cover the following.
1) How CheckDB and its sub-commands work
2) How we can control the impact of CheckDB on our instances
3) Strategies around breaking up CheckDB's work or offloading that work.
SQL Server Database Corruption Master Class
In the ever-evolving landscape of database management, ensuring data integrity is paramount. SQL Server administrators, developers, and enthusiasts must equip themselves with the knowledge and tools to address one of the most dreaded challenges in this field - database corruption. Join us for a comprehensive training day where we dive deep into the intricacies of SQL Server database corruption.
In this training session, you will embark on a journey to uncover the nuances of database corruption that extend far beyond the basics.
We will explore various aspects, including index corruption, boot page errors, and advanced forms of corruption, shedding light on their causes, detection methods, and, most importantly, the strategies for mitigation and recovery.
Key Learning Objectives:
Understanding the Nature of Database Corruption:
Explore the common causes of corruption and the impact on data integrity and system performance.
Delving into Index Corruption:
Learn about corruption in your indexes and heaps, and the impact on your queries.
Master techniques to identify and repair index corruption.
Unmasking Boot Page Errors:
Gain insights into the critical boot page and its role in database startup.
Discover how to troubleshoot and resolve boot page errors to ensure smooth SQL Server operation.
Delving Into System Pages:
Learn about how corruption in your system pages, like PFS, GAM, SGAM, etc affect your database.
Discover how to identify and rectify these issues.
Advanced Recovery Strategies
Understanding how HA/DR affects recovery solutions
Explore more elusive and complex forms of database corruption.
Equip yourself with advanced techniques to identify and rectify these issues.
Hands-On Practice:
Engage in practical exercises to reinforce your understanding and sharpen your skills.
Utilize real-world scenarios to simulate and resolve corruption issues.
By the end of this training day, you will be well-equipped to tackle SQL Server database corruption with confidence, ensuring the integrity of your data and the efficiency of your systems.
Join us for an immersive learning experience and be prepared to become a proficient database corruption detective and problem solver.
Don't miss this opportunity to unravel the mysteries of SQL Server database corruption and enhance your database management skills.
Register today and take the first step toward becoming a corruption expert.
Treating Tables Like Legos: Partitioning basics
Do you have tables and indexes that have grown really large? Are you moving around a lot more data than you used to? Are your windows for jobs and maintenance getting tighter? If you answered yes to any of these questions, partitioning may be for you!
With partitioning, you can break a table or index down into smaller more manageable chunks. It can help you perform maintenance on just part of a table or index. You can even move data in and out of tables with quick and easy metadata only operations.
We’ll go over basic partitioning concepts such as horizontal vs. vertical partitioning, and techniques like partitioned views and full blown table partitioning. We’ll also look at how partitioning affects things under the hood. Finally you'll see some cool demos/tricks around index maintenance and data movement.
At the end of this session you’ll have a firm understanding of how partitioning works and be able to make decisions on how and when to partition.
You'll learn…
• The components of table partitioning and how they fit together • How to make your index maintenance partition aware
• How Partition elimination can help your queries
• How to split different parts of tables over different storage tiers • How to manage partitions. We'll demo this by implementing the sliding window technique.
A DBA's Guide to the Proper Handling of Corruption
Corruption can strike at any time. As DBAs how we alert, investigate, and respond can have a profound impact on our company. In this session we will learn how to detect and respond to various types of corruption.
First we will be focus on ways to detect corruption early. This will include understanding tools available to us like DBCC CheckDB as well as the importance of testing your backups. We’ll look at some sample scripts to automate corruption checks and common alerts we should have set up on our instances.
Then we will move onto how to respond. We’ll discuss the importance of incident management and the Disaster Recovery mindset and look at how we can analyze the situation safely as well as point out various pitfalls that trip people up. We’ll also discuss when and how we may be able to fix corruption vs restoring the database. Additionally we will look at a few common examples of corruption and how to fix them.
Data Pages, Allocation Units, IAM chains Oh My!…
Understanding how SQL Server organizes your data can seem like a daunting task. But we will make it fun by telling humorous stories from my past as we go through the concepts.
You’ll hear how these concepts tie in to your work as a DBA or developer. You’ll get to see the concepts in action through demos and learn how you can use this knowledge to design better solutions. We will also demo look at some neat tools to help you dig in and learn further.
We will cover the following:
• The three basic types of storage in SQL Server (Allocation Units)
• The physical structure of a rows and pages
• Differences in how SQL Server works with heaps and clustered indexes
• How pages are allocated and tracked
• How to use various tools to continue your learning
Brandon Leach
Microsoft Data Platform MVP
Chicago, Illinois, United States
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