Robert Gravelle

One of the Database Administrator (DBA)’s most important duties is performing regular scheduled database backups.   Equally important is the maintenance of the backup files and practicing of the restoration procedure.  All in all, it can be a time intensive endeavor.  That’s why having an established reliable backup and restore process is so important.  To this […]

Database administrators tend to perform a lot of routine checks on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.  Some of these are often referred to as sanity checks.  These are checks that monitor the overall health of your databases and servers and may include elements such as connectivity, volumetrics, performance, security, processes, backups, and just about […]

There are times when you need to create databases and tables from a batch file. Whether it’s part of an automated application deployment, or you need to repeat the process on many workstations, a batch process is usually the easiest and fastest solution available.  Since the emergence of Microsoft PowerShell, this has been truer than […]

From performing database backups and restores, rollbacks, sanity checks, and even the occasional report generation, there are a lot of tasks that database administrators (DBAs) have to fulfill on a regular basis. To save time and energy, most DBAs create batch jobs that can run as a Scheduled Task or on demand. The tools they […]

“Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER! If our service is down for even a minute, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed!” -The Social Network If you believe the hype, it would seem that almost all data and database as a service (DaaS/DBaaS) cloud providers operate at […]

In this final instalment of the Database Buyer’s Guide series, we will review the main pros and cons of the various RDBMS products and services solutions that we saw in the series. For more information about each category, please refer to the original article. The series progressed as follows: The complete range of DBMS types […]

All we hear these days is the Cloud this and the Cloud that. Everyone is asking each other, “Are you in the Cloud yet?” “And what is the Cloud?” you may ask. I’ll tell you… It’s a marketing buzzword; nothing more than a new way to describe third-party IT services. While these third-party services have […]

It used to be that open source software was the niche of uber–geeks and programmers who weren’t afraid to get dirty in the code. And no wonder; it was a free-for-all whose only support was the project sites’ bug reporting pages and community groups. A lot has changed since then. Just as Eclipse has revolutionized […]

The last traditional popular relational database management system (RDBMS) that we will be covering in this series is IBM DB2. Along with Oracle’s and Microsoft’s RDBMS products, DB2 captures the lion’s share of the RDBMS market. The complete range of DBMS types out there, including Desktop, Server, Web-enabled, Cloud DBaaS, and open source counterparts, were […]

This article is all about Denali. No, not the new Cirque du Soleil show, but rather Microsoft’s latest release of SQL Server, the very popular relational database management system (RDBMS). Be forewarned, it comes with a highly restrictive licensing and high cost of ownership if the database is of significant size or is used by […]

Relational database servers are made for handling large transaction volumes in a multi-user environment. Whereas some desktop databases incorporate both the front-end and data server components in one product, in a client/server environment, the network database server processes all requests for data on the server. Massaging and displaying the data is the job of the […]

Desktop databases have been around for about as long as there have been desktops. That would be since the 1980s for those of you who missed that decade. They are a favorite of Mom and Pop shops and smaller businesses in general for their low costs, ease of use, and easy integration with web pages. […]