We have 16 days until Christmas. Since I started this blog, I've posted every day Monday through Friday. I am going to make it my goal to post a new update every workday from now until the 25th regarding day to day operations and what's made my life easier. I plan to follow that up with a post every weekday from the 26th to the end of the year regarding things I would like to see done more often either in myself or the community as a whole. I'm going to start off with something more general.

First, contest giveaway!

I have 3 more 1-Month memberships to PluralSight to give away. Any comments on the Monday's post will be reviewed Wednesday night and a winner will be drawn out of a hat all the way until Christmas week. only caveat is that I have to be able to get an E-Mail address from the post. How else can I give you this prize?

On the 30th I'll be giving away a wonderful book called Professional SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting.

I decided to start a blog to help how I could. I figure I can help out a little bit more with some special prizes. Good luck to all!

Backups

We all like a little peace of mind. If your database goes down at 2 am and your job is dependent on keeping downtime minimal, how soundly are you sleeping? Personally.. I looove sleep. It's a simple thing to ensure your back up is running. Please do it for your own sake.

Recovery plan

Do you have one written up? I'd get one in line just in case something horrible happens like a squirrel crawling in and chewing on the power lines. I'd get one on the books and if nothing else, you've proven intent. Don't be the guy remembered for killing his whole business just because one server didn't get backups for a month.

Test, Test, Test

I can't express this enough. When's the last time you've tested your backup? Have you tried failing over recently? If so, you'll remember that you had a few bugs. Maybe it was only permissions that didn't come across, maybe the other server didn't power up. What ever the case was, I'd suggest yearly testing of your whole plan, weekly for your backups. If you have a staging server, Test more often if you're bored. It's never a bad idea.