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
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
Your organization has been using Azure SQL DB (Single Database) for a while now, and has come to the realization that a lot of missing features are hindering your development efforts and limiting your product offerings.
You have a need for wider access to instance-level features on the one hand, but you still want to retain managed service features in the Azure cloud, such as 99.99% uptime SLA, automatic updates, Advanced Data Security, and Azure SQL Log Analytics, and basically not having to manage an IaaS virtual machine.
Therefore, you reach the conclusion that Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI) is the right solution for you at this time.
Read More »Planning a Migration from Azure SQL DB to Azure Managed Instance
In one of my previous blog posts, Automatically Enable or Disable Jobs based on HADR Role, I provided a solution for automatically enabling or disabling scheduled jobs in combination with Availability Groups and Database Mirroring. In this blog post, I’m going to build upon my previous solution and improve it even further – taking it to the next level of automation!
Read More »Control SQL Jobs based on HADR Role – Taking it to the Next Level
You might have seen this blog post by Paul White: New Metadata-Only Column Changes in SQL Server 2016. It talks about how, when a table is compressed, you can change (i.e. increase) a column’s data type without having to create a new table and migrate the data into it, and without having to refactor all of the underlying data. But, not everything is rainbows and unicorns…
Read More »The new “metadata-only column changes” feature in SQL Server 2016 is useless!
Ever had your SHRINK operation “stuck” and didn’t know why, or how to solve it? It’s more common than you think. Check out this post for more info, tricks and tips.
Read More »Troubleshooting Long-Running SHRINK Operations
Linked Servers are an easy way to allow direct access between different SQL Servers. But, by using this feature, you may have created a wide-open backdoor into your servers! Read on for more details…
For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, Kevin Chant asked us to dream up our fantasy SQL Server feature. I love this topic and so I had to join in on this as a late (and first-time) contributor.
My ask from Microsoft for SQL Server is something that…. Well… It should be simple. It should’ve been implemented YEARS ago. I’m thinking somewhere around the year 2005.
Read More »T-SQL Tuesday #118 – I wish SQL Server had better Table Partitioning
Today I’ll talk about the main physical JOIN operator types in SQL Server (Nested Loops, Hash and Merge Joins), their differences, best practices, and complexity (which determines when the SQL Server optimizer would use them in execution plans).
Read More »The LOOP, HASH and MERGE Join Types