What’s new in SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.0
Three years ago, when the first public preview of SQL Server 2022 (CTP 2.0) was announced, I was a few months in at the SQL Docs team, and had very little to do with that…
I don’t blog anymore, but not because I work at Microsoft
Last year I had a health scare that got my blood pressure at 200-and-something over 100-and-something, soon to be wired up to an IV drip, put through a CT scanner, and a couple of weeks…
Max server memory recommendations are just a suggestion
Some of you might know me because of the Max Server Memory Matrix, a chart I created based off a decade-old algorithm developed by Jonathan Kehayias. The chart has lived at https://bornsql.ca/s/memory/ for a while. There’s…
T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #012: Why DBA skills are necessary
This is my ongoing series of answering T-SQL Tuesday posts far too late to be of any use. Click here if you want to read previous entries. Paul Randal asked us in November 2010 why…
Security update for all supported versions of SQL Server (CVE-2021-1636)
Microsoft announced updates today for all supported versions of SQL Server, for a privilege escalation vulnerability that leverages Extended Events. For security reasons no further details have been provided, but you can expect more information in…
Read the error message
This post is brought to you — indirectly — from a boss I loved working for, on a project which almost killed me, at a company which I had to walk away from to restore…
Managing virtual machine drives on ESXi
Recently I migrated my home lab from a SuperMicro SYS-E300-8D to something a little beefier. There were ten virtual machines on the SuperMicro server, nine which were allocated 127 GB of thin-provisioned storage, and one…
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!),…
Using AzCopy with Batch Files and Task Scheduler
As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of AzCopy, especially now that it has a sync option to keep local data synchronized with blob storage. In a recent release of…
Accelerated Database Recovery in SQL Server 2019: Choose your own filegroup for the version store
An exciting new feature in SQL Server 2019 is Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR). Resulting from a combination of magic beans and smart software developers (I might be wrong about the beans), there is a good…
The importance of backups
I have been selected to present a second session for the PASS Summit in November this year. I wrote a few weeks ago about the Linux Learning Path and being a part of that, so…
Better SQL Server memory defaults in 2019
In 2016 I created the Max Server Memory Matrix as a guide for configuring the maximum amount of memory that should be assigned to SQL Server, using an algorithm developed by Jonathan Kehayias. SQL Server 2019…
Better SQL Server CPU defaults in 2019
SQL Server 2019 is still in preview as I write this, but I wanted to point out a new feature that Microsoft has added to SQL Server Setup, on the Windows version. On the Database…
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. https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1137737702227550208 I felt like this was a question I’d already answered,…
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.…