As a DBA, your job involves much more than just managing databases. You must also work with customers to understand their needs and provide solutions that meet their requirements. In this blog post, we will discuss how you can implement the SPIN sales strategy concepts as part of your job.
Read More »From Good to Great: Boosting Your Performance as a DBA with the SPIN Sales Strategy
In this post, I will introduce you to a special T-SQL script that you can use for detecting potential SQL injection attacks in your database, as well as application-level bugs that you didn’t necessarily know you had.
Read More »Detect Application Bugs and Vulnerabilities You Didn’t Even Know About
In today’s post, I’ll be providing a useful script to detect and troubleshoot when the query plan cache contains too many different plans for the same query hash, which could happen as a result of possible parameterization issues.
Read More »Too Many Plans for the Same Query Hash
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Deb the DBA (b|t), who invites us to give a long rant about a question that a coworker could be asking us, without knowing what they’ve just gotten themselves into by doing that.
Well… I’ve got just the thing 🤭
Read More »T-SQL Tuesday #152 – Which version of my database was deployed? It depends!
Turns out there’s a shortage of solutions online for easily managing partitioned tables in SQL Server. Well… I guess I’ll have to do it myself!
As part of my journey to get better at Powershell, I gave myself a task: Create a project utilizing Powershell at its core, to solve a complicated problem as elegantly as possible.
A complicated problem indeed presented itself: How to remotely control multiple computers without having to log into them? Make them perform any task that could possibly be needed? Control them from one central location? And make the solution as easily scalable as possible?
I present to you, the Framework for Remote Execution using Powershell and SQL Server. Or in short: FREPS. Hmm… Actually, I may have to work on that name. 🤔
Read More »I got the Power: Remote Execution using Powershell and SQL Server
This is a T-SQL script that I’m cross-publishing with the official Madeira Data Solutions blog.
This script generates various permutations and variations of common and weak passwords and uses the PWDCOMPARE function to check whether there are any enabled SQL logins that have these passwords.
Read More »Detect Weak Passwords in SQL Server
Every once in a while there comes an opportunity to “upgrade” your abilities with newly acquired knowledge that lets you “step up your game” and possibly add some “wow factor” to your work, leaving your peers awe-struck by your amazing new “magic trick”.
As a SQL Server consultant, one such opportunity that I had in my line of work, is when I learned about “Hypothetical Indexes” and how to use them.
Read More »Performance Tuning Like a Pro – with Hypothetical Indexes
Do you find yourself facing performance problems and long lock chains caused by very frequent INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statements being executed on a table? Check out this neat trick that could help you out and make all the difference in the world.
Read More »The Asynchronous Ledger Trick for Fast SQL Server Insert, Update and Delete Processes
If you know me, you already know that I’m a huge fan of automation. Therefore, it’s natural to assume that I would dabble in Powershell at least once or twice or a few dozen, as a method to implement useful automations. After all, automation is pretty much the whole essence of Powershell in the first place.
As I used Powershell scripts more and more, I learned that there are a few things that are important to have whenever you use such scripts as part of automation (by “automation” I mean any sort of operation done “unattended”, i.e. without direct human interaction in real-time).
Read More »One handy Powershell script template to rule them all