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.
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Read our latest blog entries
SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 is end of life on 9 July 2019
Next month, Microsoft is ending five years of extended support on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. This follows five years of mainstream support before that. You really should be upgrading to SQL Server 2017 at the very least, with some serious consideration to the unreleased SQL Server 2019. My reasoning for suggesting
-> Continue reading SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 is end of life on 9 July 2019
What is a container anyway?
Recently there was a thread on Twitter which established that a lot of IT people didn’t know the difference between virtual machines and containers. |￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|| CONTAINERS || ARE NOT | | VIRTUAL || MACHINES || ＿＿＿＿＿____| (__/) || (•ㅅ•) || / づ — Ian Coldwater ⎈ (@IanColdwater) June 9, 2019 I felt like this
-> Continue reading What is a container anyway?
Containers and data: you gotta keep ’em separated
There was an interesting conversation on Twitter recently, between Grant Fritchey (blog | twitter), Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter), Anthony E. Nocentino (blog | twitter), Vicky Harp (twitter), and me about containers and SQL Server. Here’s the summary tweet: Already mentioned, you can use a persisted storage volume to keep your databases around (thanks @_randolph_west
-> Continue reading Containers and data: you gotta keep ’em separated
My IT department installed an antivirus with SQL Server
Time for another short blog post, and this one combines two topics I am very passionate about: security, and SQL Server performance. Let’s start by talking about “antivirus” and what that means in today’s world. The term antivirus (AV) itself is outdated; traditionally, AV products detected malicious activity through fixed patterns of code or patterns
-> Continue reading My IT department installed an antivirus with SQL Server
SQL Server containers no longer being updated in the Docker registry
In October 2018, Microsoft announced a change to the source of their Docker containers. You should be using the new Microsoft Container Registry (MCR) as the source for official Docker container images for Microsoft products. While existing container images in the Docker Hub are not affected, you may not get updated images unless you switch.
-> Continue reading SQL Server containers no longer being updated in the Docker registry
Speaking at PASS Summit 2019
I am delighted to announce that I have been selected to speak at the largest Microsoft Data Platform conference in the world, PASS Summit 2019, in Seattle WA, USA. As our database community has extended beyond SQL Server into Azure and other platforms, there’s a lot to take in over the course of three days
-> Continue reading Speaking at PASS Summit 2019
Proposed SQL Server defaults: max server memory
A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances: Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable lightweight pooling if it is enabled Disable priority boost if it is enabled Set optimize for ad hoc workloads to enabled Set max server memory (MB) to a
-> Continue reading Proposed SQL Server defaults: max server memory
The easy way to handle UTF-8 in a .NET application when dealing with SQL Server 2019
A short post this week. On a mailing list recently, someone noticed that a .NET application writing to SQL Server did not have the expected behaviour with UTF-8 collation and data types. To refresh our memories, UTF-8 is newly supported in SQL Server 2019, and provides potential savings of up to 50% when storing strings,
-> Continue reading The easy way to handle UTF-8 in a .NET application when dealing with SQL Server 2019
A short Azure SQL Database Edge explainer
On Thursday May 2nd, 2019, Microsoft announced a new edition of SQL Server targeting Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices. That means SQL Server can now run almost anywhere. From the Venturebeat article: It supports ARM and x64-based edge gateways and machines, and offers low-latency analytics that combine data streaming and time-series data, with in-database
-> Continue reading A short Azure SQL Database Edge explainer
The case of scalar UDF inlining, where context is everything
Here’s an interesting story for you this week. As part of the new Intelligent Query Processing improvements introduced in the upcoming SQL Server 2019, we find a new feature called scalar UDF inlining. This post is not about scalar UDF inlining exactly, but IQP-adjacent if you like. It works by taking a typical scalar user-defined
-> Continue reading The case of scalar UDF inlining, where context is everything