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…
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…
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…
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…
(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…
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,…
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…
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…
I love theatre. In six months I am putting on two one-act plays for a local festival, because I don’t already have enough on my plate. Security theatre, on the other hand, I don’t like.…
[2018-07-03 edit: The original name of this feature was XE Profiler, but it was changed to XEvent Profiler in SSMS 17.4.] I have a favourite new feature of SQL Server Management Studio 17 (SSMS), and…
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…
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…
In the #sqlhelp Slack channel on the SQL Server Community Slack workspace last month, Jemma Hooper asked: When trying to CAST or CONVERT a datetime2 value to binary(8), I’m getting a “binary or text data…
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…
October is a busy month for me. I am flying all over the US and Canada for speaking engagements to share some thoughts about migrating your SQL Server environment to the cloud (specifically Azure). Compañero…