Did you know that we can have basic datetime arithmetics in SQL server? We can use subtraction to find an accurate difference between two dates, and use addition to add an accurate interval to a datetime column or variable.
Read this post to learn more.
As part of its regular, ongoing, day-to-day activities, your SQL Server instance would naturally collect historical data about its automated operations. If left unchecked, this historical data could pile up, leading to wasted storage space, performance hits, and even worse issues.
MSDB would obviously be collecting data about the SQL Agent job executions. But there are also several other types of historical data that needs to be cleaned up once in a while. I hope to cover all bases and leave no historical data un-cleaned.
Read More »Keep Your MSDB Clean
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Brent Ozar, who asks us to Blog about our Favorite Data Type (or Least Favorite).
I find it actually quite easy to decide both on a most-favorite, as well as a least-favorite data type in SQL Server. So, why not blog about both?
This is one of those things that I would have never expected to adopt, and yet here I am! Not just loving “infinite” loops, but also confident enough that I can convince you to feel the same!
Read More »I learned to love WHILE (true) and you should too
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.
Click here if you missed my previous post: Common issues during SentryOne version upgrades.
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.
This also includes utilizing the platform to do all kinds of “unorthodox” monitoring, which is not available “out-of-the-box”.
Read More »Monitoring SQL Server Version Updates using SentryOne
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