Tag Archives: redgate

Automated Restore Fun (ARF)

script it…walk away.

Over the last a couple of weeks I started reviewing an automated restore solution I had been playing around with for a couple years.  RedGate SQL Backup had thrown some errors and since we couldn’t go without backups while waiting on RedGate support we decided to move ALL backup operations to Ola Hallengren’s scripts.  We also decided to ditch RedGate because they sent us back a list of reported bugs we had submitted and told us they aren’t going to fix it. So in other words “despite the fact that you have multiple licenses of multiple softwares across many servers, we feel your issues as a customer aren’t important to us as a software company.” With that we decided to roll our own solutions that we can customize for our environment…

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Workload Simulation With SQL Data Generator

testing is science…

Introduction

In college one of my mentors was a jedi  master of simulations and testing.  The guy could write a simulation for just about anything you can think of, and with anything you can think of.  I’m pretty sure that he once made a neural network for simulating dinosaur procreation rates…using sticks and mud (true story).  Simulating workloads can help you thoroughly test ideas and present data to management that will allow them to make informed decisions.  IRL, your career will be much happier if you can test your ideas BEFORE deploying them to production.  No one is asking you to have good ideas all the time, but the business is depending on you to come up with ideas that will work as intended.  The only way to accomplish this responsibly, is to test.

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