I’ve been pondering a question recently. “Has PASS outlived its purpose?” To help answer that question, I went to the PASS website to look for its mission statement. I couldn’t find it in the dropdown menus. I searched the site. No results found. That’s disappointing. And perhaps it explains why the organization is struggling as…
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Last week, Guardicore released information about a newly discovered attack that uses SQL Servers to compromise servers and networks. Here’s a link; I’d really encourage you to read it. The attack known as Vollgar uses a simple brute force attack to gain access to SQL Servers exposed to the internet. It then uses the elevated…
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We’ve all asked that question at some point. Maybe we inherited a new-to-us SQL Server that hasn’t been maintained regularly. Or, perhaps we’re prepping for a maintenance window and we want to get the latest update into Test as soon as possible. Regardless, we want to know two things. First, what product version is my…
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“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain Each year I read approximately 30 books for the pure pleasure of creating in my imagination the sights and sounds and smells of the world that the author has created in…
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Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Thom Coats of The Unstuck Business Academy for their “Stories from the C|Suite” podcast. Thom is a wonderful host and we had a lot of fun talking about everything from camping and hiking, to professional development, to effectively managing SQL Server infrastructures. Here’s a…
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Many companies have lean IT organizations and find themselves with five, ten, or even twenty production SQL Servers and no dedicated Database Administrator to care for them. Instead, they rely on other IT Professionals to ensure the database servers are performant. We’ve worked with many companies where SysAdmins, Application Developers, and Network Administrators have been…
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Installing SQL Server is surprisingly easy. Download the media, double-click the setup file, answer a few configuration questions, and in less than 15 minutes you have a fully functional database server. And the server performs well. For a while. Then it slows down and maybe even a database corrupts. You recover by restoring the prior…
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As of July 9, 2019, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 have officially passed from Extended Support to No Longer Supported. What does that mean? It means that Microsoft will no longer release any updates for any version of SQL Server 2008. That includes security patches and data integrity fixes. If a hacker…
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We’re frequently asked how many tempdb files a SQL Server should have, especially from those who have downloaded our free 5 Common SQL Server Configuration Issues PDF. That’s because there’s a lot of well-intended but incorrect information posted on the internet about tempdb. What Is tempdb? Let’s start with a very brief description of tempdb. When SQL…
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It’s what you learn after you know it all that really counts. – John Wooden As an avid reader and life-long learner, this quote by Coach John Wooden really speaks to me. I don’t want to wax too philosophical here, but life is a journey and we owe it to ourselves and those we influence…
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