Author: Mika Sutinen

Hi, My name is Mika Sutinen and I'm a Cloud DBA Team Lead at the company called Nordcloud. I've been working in IT-industry for two decades, and I've spend most of my career working with healthcare information systems. I've worked with SQL Server for most of my career, starting with version 6.5 a long, long time ago. My other interests are high availability, everything related to performance (testing, monitoring, etc), Windows operating systems and I'm currently learning more about Azure.

Low Impact Maintenance for Multi-Terabyte Data Estates

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in SQL Server, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

Core responsibility of a DBA is to make sure that the databases they are responsible for are maintained properly. In a nutshell this usually means that you are taking backups of the data, checking the consistency of the databases and maintaining statistics and indexes. Performing these tasks gives the DBA the ability to provide the agreed SLAs for the system.

However the trade-off for doing all these tasks is that it requires some computing resources and it can sometimes impact the performance of the connecting applications, and through that the SLAs in a negative way.

In this post we’ll look at how to implement low impact database maintenance routines for environments that have large databases and are accessed 24/7 by the users.

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SQL Server 2019 security improvements: Feature Restrictions

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Databases, Security, SQL Server
Tilted Stop sign vector image
Restricted!

Very recently I was working on a customer databases, when I more or less stumbled on a something I had not noticed before. Apparently at some point the latest version of SQL Server (I was working with Azure SQL DB) had a new security enhancement added into it called Feature Restrictions. As this was something I had not heard about before, I figured this would be a good opportunity to dig in and learn more about it.

Note: As I was finishing up this post to add links and such, I noticed that the official documentation from Microsoft regarding Feature Restrictions has completely vanished.

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Platform-as-a-Service databases and the future of the DBA role

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, Career advice, Databases, SQL Server, SQL Server DBA

I just realized that it has been awhile since my last post, so I figured it’s time to do one before the end of the year. Last few months have been rather hectic with me migrating new workloads to Cloud as well as taking the time to visit PASS Summit 2019 to learn more about Microsoft Data Platform.

I also wanted to finish up my year of blogging by writing about a topic close to my heart, the evolution of the DBA role in the Cloud era. I did have a session about this topic in SQLSaturday Finland earlier this year and I will be doing a PASS Cloud Virtual Group presentation about it on January 16th.

In this post we’ll be looking at one of the Cloud technologies that have significant impact on the DBA role in the future, Platform-as-a-Service databases.

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Azure SQL Database SLA is awesome

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, Data Platform, Databases

Microsoft recently released their new SLA, RPO and RTO guarantees for Azure SQL Database and oh boy, those are really something else. In fact they are so much something else, that at the moment of me writing this, no other cloud provider has managed to promise the same level of business continuity for their Platform-as-a-Service database services.

Besides the highest SLA currently in the market Microsoft has gone one step further and is now guaranteeing also RPO and RTO for their service. Now this is very interesting approach because neither Google or AWS is giving any for their own services.

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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 4: Managed Backups

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, SQL Server, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

You’re now reading the 4th and final post in my SQL Server Backups to Azure series. In previous posts I’ve described how to setup an Azure Storage Account, Blob Storage container an how to take SQL Server backups there. This time we’ll take a look at one more option that puts our backups on autopilot, with destination to cloud!

The feature I am writing about is Managed Backups, option that has been available since SQL Server 2014 but one that I have not seen often used. One reason for that maybe being, that there’s an unfixed feature that makes enabling it bit difficult if you’re not aware of the workaround.

Despite this shortcoming, if you have SQL Servers (on-premise or Cloud) but no DBA to care for them, I’d recommend that you take a look at this option.

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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 3: Custom Backups

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, SQL Server, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

You are now reading the 3rd part of the 4 part series on backing up databases to Azure. In Part 1 we looked at some of the benefits of using Azure for your backups and in Part 2 we setup the Storage Account with the Block Blob storage container.

In this post we’ll take a look at how to use the freshly created Blob storage with our customized backup routines.

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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 2: Setting up the Storage Account

Posted on by Mika Sutinen in Azure, SQL Server Administration, SQL Server DBA

This is the second part of a 4 part blog post series about backing up SQL Server to Azure. If you’re wondering why you’d like to backup data to Azure in the first place, please read the Part 1 of this series that explains some of the benefits of using Azure for backups.

In this post we’ll look at how to setup your very own Storage Account and how to use some of the nice security features in it.

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