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Installing SQL Server on Windows? Don’t forget these two useful switches
A few days ago on Twitter I wrote: Couldn’t connect to new SQL Server install because I forgot to enable TCP/IP. I’m the lead author for a Microsoft Press book about SQL Server administration. Aside from demonstrating that checklists are helpful, it did raise an interesting point about why this isn’t a configurable option in
-> Continue reading Installing SQL Server on Windows? Don’t forget these two useful switches
Did you know we have another SQL Server book coming out?
SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out was the first technical book I contributed to, and all its authors were very happy with how it turned out. All the content was written from scratch, which made it quite challenging to manage (it originally started as a book about SQL Server 2016, and then Microsoft surprised everyone
-> Continue reading Did you know we have another SQL Server book coming out?
SQL Server 2019 is here
With the release of SQL Server 2019, I wanted to highlight in a single place some things that I’m excited about. Drawing on sessions I presented this year at SQLBits and SQL Saturday Edmonton respectively, these are features in SQL Server 2019 for the busy DBA: UTF-8 in-engine support Intelligent query processing features Replacing sqlcmd
-> Continue reading SQL Server 2019 is here
When security and news collide
Behold! There’s a scary monster called skip‑2.0, announced by ESET: This backdoor targets MSSQL Server 11 and 12, allowing the attacker to connect stealthily to any MSSQL account by using a magic password – while automatically hiding these connections from the logs. Such a backdoor could allow an attacker to stealthily copy, modify or delete
-> Continue reading When security and news collide
Speaking at SQL Saturday Oregon
SQL Saturday Oregon — in the city of Portland — is taking place next weekend on Saturday November 2nd, 2019, and I’ll be presenting a revised edition of my session “Back to the Future with Temporal Tables.” It’s the Saturday before PASS Summit 2019 which is once again in Seattle. I’m giving two sessions there
-> Continue reading Speaking at SQL Saturday Oregon
Using indexed views? What is an imprecise or non-deterministic convert?
After last week’s post about using WITH (NOEXPAND) to query indexed views even on SQL Server Enterprise Edition, this week is a short but interesting side-road into deterministic values, and why it is important to get your data types correct. Longtime readers will know I care deeply about data types. Here is a T-SQL query
-> Continue reading Using indexed views? What is an imprecise or non-deterministic convert?
Using indexed views? Don’t forget this important tip.
Today after fighting with designing a view that let me create a clustered index on it (indexed views — also known as materialized views — are awesome in the right context!), I kept running into the same problem whenever I clicked Display Estimated Execution Plan in SQL Server Management Studio. The problem was that the plan was doing
-> Continue reading Using indexed views? Don’t forget this important tip.
How to read documentation
I was thinking about a comment I made to my intern last week. She has been studiously attending to all the different things I do in my day (what many people consider a well-guarded secret!), and over the last few days we were writing documentation for a customer I’m helping build out a brand new
-> Continue reading How to read documentation
Gatekeeping and Accessibility
In my final post about gatekeeping in technology, I have to come clean about something. Let’s go through this journey together. In the first post we spoke about what gatekeeping is. In the second we looked at choosing our words carefully. In the third post, we looked at diversity in the workplace, and also how
-> Continue reading Gatekeeping and Accessibility
SQL Server 2019 on Docker no longer runs as root by default
In my home lab I have an Ubuntu virtual machine that runs both SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server 2019 in Docker containers.
After SQL Server 2019 Release Candidate 1 was released, when I performed my usual migration to get the latest version, I noticed that the command line for the SQL Server instance was different.
I used sudo docker ps -a --no-trunc to see the full command, which is emulated below (note: this output is heavily abbreviated).