On the week of December 7th (especially on December 9th), Microsoft has sent us a whole bag of goodies, announcing the general availability of new features that were only in preview until now, and even newer features that have just entered public preview.
Read More »Breaking News: Christmas came early to Microsoft Azure!
Following the recent acquisition of SentryOne by SolarWinds, I’ve decided to write a few special blog posts dedicated to our favorite SQL server monitoring platform.
As part of the managed DBA service that Madeira data solutions provides, we make extensive use of the SentryOne monitoring and alerting platform. As such, we’ve gathered significant experience in using, managing, and maintaining the platform. That also includes quite a few issues that tend to repeat themselves, specifically during SentryOne version upgrades.
Read More »Common issues during SentryOne version upgrades
On November 19th, 2020, I delivered a short session about Azure SQL Analytics, as part of the MVP Days Israel 2020 event.
MVP Days Israel 2020 was a full-day event driven by the local (Israeli) MVP community to share knowledge on various Microsoft products across the board – Azure, GitHub, DevOps, Power Apps, AI, Data Platform and more.
We had a bunch of impressive talks given by very talented people. My session was delivered in Hebrew, and it was mostly based on what I wrote in one of my previous blog posts: Is Azure SQL Analytics all you need for SQL Server Monitoring?.
Read More »Webinar: Performance Monitoring with Azure SQL Analytics
Way back at January 16, 2020, I published a blog post containing a reference list for the many rules checked by the SQL Vulnerability Assessment Tool. The next month, I created a separate, dedicated page for the reference list so that it’d be easier to find and maintain. Today I learned that a few months later, around the beginning of May, Microsoft themselves have also published such a reference list on the Microsoft Docs page.
Read More »SQL Vulnerability Assessment Tool Reference List – Updated!
Following an incident at a customer’s production environment, Nathan Lifshes and I realized that we stumbled upon a yet-unknown bug in SQL Server, causing an access violation error, memory dumps, dropped connections, and even cluster fail-overs.
Read More »Access Violation error when querying from a system table function with parallelism
This month’s #tsql2sday came to us from Rob Volk (b|t), who asks us to explain databases using an analogy, as if explaining to a 5 year old. I’m actually a big fan of The Feynman Technique (aka ELI5), so I really wanted to participate. But to be honest, I nearly missed out this time simply because I couldn’t think of an idea this whole week.
On the very last day, when the posts already started rolling out by all the bloggers, I’ve read a few, and only then the muse finally hit me. I kid you not, the time is literally 23:59 here in Israel as I hit the publish button!
So anyways, the idea I had was for the ALTER TABLE..SWITCH TO command in SQL Server.
Read More »T-SQL Tuesday #131 – Star Trek Candy and SWITCH TO
In this blog post I’ll help you troubleshoot the rare but critical issues of Deadlocked Schedulers and high THREADPOOL waits – using practical means.
Also, very useful T-SQL script towards the end.
Read More »How to Troubleshoot THREADPOOL Waits and Deadlocked Schedulers
Following my presentation of “How to HADR Your SQL Server Jobs” at the HA/DR PASS Virtual Group yesterday, David Klee (@kleegeek) and I continued chatting for a bit longer after the recording was concluded. During which, the MSX/TSX feature of SQL Server came up, and David suggested that I’d utilize my newly earned MVP status to push a feature request to expand these capabilities.
Read More »Feature Request – Expand MSX/TSX Capabilities for HADR
Assume you have some kind of process outside the SQL Server which is supposed to record some kind of database activity. There are many ways to do it, most of which require constant and/or stable connection to the database. But what if that’s not good enough? Let’s consider our options.
Read More »Using Extended Events as a Buffer
In this post, I hope to summarize the various methods that we have, in order to get rid of that annoying authentication prompt. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of complexity of implementation, versatility, and the level of security that it provides. More specifically: the more secure and versatile a method is – the more complicated it is to implement.
Read More »Overriding the Authentication in SSRS for External Access