Instead of working, I blog.

I talked to a dev friend of mine recently and he presented me with a very common problem that he ran across at work.  With it being the holidays still, a lot of the members of his team are on vacation.  Well, a problem came up and he was stuck troubleshooting by himself because he couldn’t get anyone on the phone.  And to top it off it’s a very complicated system with no clear troubleshooting paths, so the SMEs are very important in this case.

This is a very common mistake that a lot of shops make.  You need to make sure you have full coverage even when everyone’s on vacation.  At my gig we’re all vacation this week, but we still have people taking turns being on-call in case something breaks.  So if you guys really want to avoid problems like these, take the easy road and make sure that someone is at least on-call during vacations.

It’s just that easy.

Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at:
http://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com

Read my book reviews at:
www.ITBookworm.com

Blog Author of:
Database Underground – http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/sean-mccown

Follow my Twitter:

http://twitter.com/MidnightDBA

Hey everyone, go check-out our new techie gift guide this year…

http://infoworld.com/d/applications/last-minute-xmas-wish-list-2009-296

 

Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at:
http://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com

Read my book reviews at:
www.ITBookworm.com

Blog Author of:
Database Underground – http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/sean-mccown

Follow my Twitter:

http://twitter.com/MidnightDBA

Someone just wrote to tell me that they just had a major outage on their main DW server due to one of the teams upgrading a driver.  There was nothing wrong with what they did, so there’s no reason to believe it would have brought the entire system down.

All I can say is that they had the best DR plan in existence and I had to share it with you so you can mimic it in your own shops.  All you have to do is not take any system-level backups and don’t save any of your configs or any of your files, or document any of your processes.  Then you can just have everyone in the dept wish as hard as they can that nothing bad will ever happen.

It must be an excellent DR plan because it’s the same one that so many companies use.  And it costs next to nothing to implement, which is probably why it’s so popular.  And the real joy is that you can put it into practice almost as quickly as you can put it on paper.  It takes next to no approval from the brass either.

I really don’t see the big deal with DR though.  There’s so much time online and in magazines/books dedicated to this topic and I just don’t get it.  If so many companies already have this practically foolproof DR plan then what’s left to discuss?  I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and I can’t come up with a single situation where this wouldn’t apply. 

Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at:
http://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com

Read my book reviews at:
www.ITBookworm.com

Blog Author of:
Database Underground – http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/sean-mccown

Follow my Twitter:

http://twitter.com/MidnightDBA

We’re holding our first SQL Saturday event in Dallas and I’m in charge of speakers.  So this is an official call for speakers.  If any of you speakers out there are going to be in Dallas (or would like to come) on May 22, then send me an abstract by Feb 15 and we’ll get you going.

Send the abstracts directly to me at KO@KenpoSecrets.com

OK, that’s all I’ve got for now.

Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at:
http://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com

Read my book reviews at:
www.ITBookworm.com

Blog Author of:
Database Underground – http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/sean-mccown

Follow my Twitter:

http://twitter.com/MidnightDBA

Hey guys... this is my first real video blog... let me know if you hate it too much.

I recently had a conversation with Brian Knight and he told me about his new site.  Actually, I was supposed to have posted this mon, but I’m only now getting around to it. 

I could sit here and tell you about Brian’s new site, but it may be best to hear it directly from Brian himself:

The site is focused only on BI for Microsoft developers. We’re launching with more than 150 blog posts day 1 and 30 articles and are going to have an article a day (Monday -Thursday) for 2009 and 2010.  It’s pretty much a classic community but has a lot of social networking built into it like adding others as friends, walls, etc.

Now, I’ve already been a couple times and there really is a lot of content there.  So go check it out and maybe if we’re all lucky, Brian will let me do a couple articles for him.

Let’s all go check it out: http://www.BIDN.com

 

Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at:
http://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com

Read my book reviews at:
www.ITBookworm.com

Blog Author of:
Database Underground – http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/sean-mccown

Follow my Twitter:

http://twitter.com/MidnightDBA