The Ashdar Partners Blog

(With apologies to David Foster Wallace.) I follow various tags on stackexchange  sites, primarily database-related things. If you do this for long enough, you will see certain questions come up again and again. Frequently Asked Questions. FAQs. This is not a new phenomenon, it dates from the days of USENET and probably even before then One of those FAQs is: "OMG, something horrible happened to my database, I don't have any backups and now I think my boss will yell at me and hurt my feelings. How can I restore the data before that happens?". As a DBA, your first job is being able to restore the data . Just backing up the database isn't any good if you can't restore it. It doesn't matter if you are using SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, postgresql or any other data storage technology. It doesn't matter if you are an "accidental DBA" and would rather be coding. (I started my career as a coder and, frankly, I would rather be coding too.) People rely o...

I had an old Windows XP VHD that I used as a development environment for a client. I don't work with that VHD anymore, but I didn't want to just delete it. I did want to get the VHD off of my laptop to free up storage space and cut down on backup requirements. It seemed that the thing to do was to put in on my ESXi 5.0 host. But, how does one do that? Ah, a learning opportunity... One googles, and one finds that VMWare provides a tool called the "VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Client". This tool is aimed at industrial-scale conversions and it can handle a couple of different situations (different sources, primarily). I downloaded the  tool, installed it , and used it. It was surprisingly easy. I did get some warnings about not having some sysprep files in place. That was a little scary, but I had a fallback path (the old VHD). If the new VMWare VM was broken, I would only have lost some time and gained some experience. I ignored the error. (From goog...