Background Whilst watching a Pluralsight training course by Paul Randal, on ‘Logging, Recovery and the Transaction log’, a particular snippet related to differential backups piqued my curiosity. Basically, does a differential backup only take backups of altered pages, within a database. The short answer is ‘yes’, but the detail is a little bit more interesting …
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BackgroundWhen SQL Server extends data or log files it fills the newly-acquired space with zeroes, to overwrite any data that may have been there beforehand. This action takes place when a database is created, restored, files are extended or added.This can take a long time, depending upon the amount of space being initialised. This is …
Background Untested backups. An awful lot is said about taking regular backups, although an inordinate number of people out there appear to ignore it. What is less talked about is actually checking that the backups are usable – it’s no good having a series of backups for that fateful day to discover that when they’re …
Or rather, on a Test or Development server instance. If you need to do this to a Live server, then you have larger issues. Most sites have servers for Developers and DBAs to work their dark magic, as well as various test servers for the next level of testing. These servers do, of course, have …
Notes on SQL 