This blog post is written in response to the T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Allen Kinsel. He has selected very interesting subject for T-SQL Tuesday – Disaster and Recovery. This subject took me in past – my past. There were various things, I had done or proposed when I started very first month as a DBA trainee. I was tagged along with very senior DBA in my organization who always protected me or correct my mistake. He was great guy and totally understand the young mind of over-enthusiastic Trainee DBA. I respect him very much.

Here are few things which I had learned in my very first month (not necessarily I have practices them on production).

• Never compress (zip) native backup using any tools, when disaster happen sometime the extra time to un-compress the database can be too long and not acceptable for business SLA
• Do not truncate logs
• After restoring full database backup – only restore latest differential back, no need to restore all the backup
• Always write WHERE condition when deleting and updating

Sr. DBA always advised me – always keep your résumé ready and car ready – you never know when you can not recover disaster! Well for sure it was a joke. Today’s T-SQL Tuesday remind me of my very first month as DBA trainee.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)