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Welcome to 2018

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I have been working on a new information session, which I’m hoping to deliver this year. It’s about one of my favourite topics: dates and times. On that note, if you are reading this in… 

No moving parts, the story of persistent memory

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In November 2017, during the PASS Summit keynote, Microsoft’s Bob Ward (Principal Architect) demonstrated a “diskless database” running on Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) hardware. The storage layer is known as “persistent memory”. At the end of… 

Disable, don’t delete those indexes

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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… 

Take a walk

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When I need to clear my head, I go for a walk. When I need to think about a problem, I go for a walk. When I need to plan a new talk, I go… 

All Mac users should do this immediately

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This post is a public service announcement for all users of macOS High Sierra (10.13). (Note: Apple has already released a fix, but if you do not have automatic updates enabled, this may still affect… 

Introducing Azure Data Studio

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(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… 

MySQL has this feature that SQL Server needs

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In the grand scheme of things, MySQL and SQL Server operate in different realms. It’s difficult to compare them because MySQL is predominantly used for websites as part of the free LAMP stack (Linux, Apache,… 

SQL Server 2017 Administration Inside Out

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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… 

T-SQL Tuesday: The Contributing Factor

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Ewald Cress writes: Find a person or several people to pick on, and tell us a shareable story or two about how they have made a positive contribution in your life. I’ve known Ewald for… 

Repair a Windows Server 2016 installation

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This is more for my benefit in the future, but hopefully it can help someone else too. We recently had problems with a development server not installing Windows Updates. The fix was to repair the… 

The perils of RAID

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Recently, I was asked to assist an organization with getting their data back for a SQL Server that had experienced physical hard drive failure. I asked a lot of questions about the configuration of the…