Founded by Data Platform MVP, Randolph West, Born SQL provides specialist SQL Server services, upgrades, on-site support and disaster recovery services in western Canada. Allow us to identify what’s hurting your database environment, implement changes with little to no downtime and keep your server running smoothly.
Data management. Simplified.
Find the SQL Server solution for your needs
dbSnitch
Discover exactly what’s hampering your SQL Server database environment and how to fix it.
Upgrade Wizard
Update your SQL Server to the latest version, or any older version currently supported by Microsoft.
Disaster Recovery
Recover data that may have been lost on databases from SQL Server 2005 and upwards.
2-Day Tune-Up
Improve your SQL Server performance in two days or your get 50% of your money back.
DBA
Get the on-site or remote Database Administration solution for all your SQL Server needs.
Speaking
Find out where Born SQL will be sharing knowledge or book our expertise for your event.
Sign up to our blog and get e-mail notifications for new entries
SQL Server knowledge. Shared.
Read our latest blog entries
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).
Gatekeeping and the lack of diversity in the workplace
Recently I have become more vocal on Twitter and on my personal blog about my social activism. For the record, I have been an activist for LGBTQIA+ rights since 2001, so if this comes as a surprise to anyone, you haven’t been paying attention. This activism gives me a unique opportunity in my roles as
-> Continue reading Gatekeeping and the lack of diversity in the workplace