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?
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
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
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 in SQL Server get “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