Secure or fast? Secure, obviously …
By now you have probably seen the news about a major flaw in the design of CPUs from all major vendors (Intel, AMD, and ARM) resulting in a series of vulnerabilities in operating systems and…
Disable, don’t delete those indexes
A quick post this week, since it’s that time of the year when people do gift exchanges and put up colourful lights. Here goes: If we need to remove an unused index, we should disable…
Introducing Azure Data Studio
(Last edited on 9 January 2020) Note: This was originally written for the book SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out, but did not meet the publishing deadline. A revised version is now included in the…
SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out
For the last five months or so, I have been helping some really smart people put words on paper, both the physical and electronic kind, which is hopefully going to culminate in an actual technical…
Changes to Service Packs and Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2017
Edited on 10 October 2018: Please note that this model has changed. See Changes to the SQL Server servicing model (Cumulative Updates) for more. The updated information is below. For a few years now, Microsoft…
Does rebuilding my clustered index also rebuild my non-clustered indexes?
I’ve been working with SQL Server for many years now, and up until recently, I assumed that rebuilding any clustered index would cause non-clustered indexes to be rebuilt as well, because the non-clustered index includes…
Remote Storage Sync and Restore updated
Recently, I presented my “Back up and Restore your Database with Azure Blob Storage” session to the Bellingham PASS Chapter. There are two components to the Azure Blob Storage Sync and Restore utility: Sync and…
PSA: Check Your Backups
This post comes to you from the Spanish countryside. I travel a lot these days, sometimes even for work. The best part about travelling, apart from food, is knowing that my backups are in good…
On Best Practices
We hear a lot about “best practice”, but what does it mean in the context of SQL Server? Wikipedia describes best practice as follows: A best practice is a method or technique that has been…
Compressed and Encrypted Backups on the Cheap
We back up our databases regularly. We store them on a secure network location so that if the database drive fails, we can still satisfy the requirements for a rapid disaster recovery time (RTO, or…
98% of I/O is taken up by tempdb
During a recent engagement, the customer explained that the performance on their relatively small system was especially slow on Monday morning, but generally bad that entire day. The SQL Server 2008 R2 instance, which runs…
Max Server Memory Matrix
When we perform diagnostics on an existing SQL Server instance, or if we are setting up a new machine, it’s very important to make sure that we change the Max Server Memory setting to an…
Update to Azure Blob Storage Sync and Restore
Blob Storage Sync tool updated During a SQL Server migration this month, I found some inconsistencies in my Azure Blob Storage Sync tool, so I made several improvements, and fixed an outstanding bug. As you…
Pre-Announcement Announcement
On Saturday, 27 June 2015, I will be presenting at SQLSaturday #407 in Vancouver BC. The session is titled “Restoring a SQL Server Database from Azure Blob Storage”. I will be releasing some new content…
SQLSaturday #407 in Vancouver
I have been selected to speak at SQLSaturday #407 in Vancouver, on 27 June 2015. My topic is about restoring SQL Server backups from Azure Blob Storage, and how to make this process easier (and…
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