“We need faster storage.” Sound familiar? Or what about “No, the storage is good; we need to tune the database.” Often teams will have very different opinions about the root cause of a performance issue. Microsoft’s free DiskSpd utility can help identify disk I/O performance issues for your SQL server systems. Here’s a short introduction…
Read more
Unfortunately malware attacks attempting to exploit vulnerable SQL Servers are often successful. Last spring, Guardicore announced that the Vollgar attack that was making its way around the internet. Just last month, it was MrbMiner in the news. And there have been countless other attacks targeting SQL Server over the year. So, how can your protect…
Read more
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…
Read more
SQL Server hardware can be powerful. Lots of CPU cores and memory. Just what a crypto miner may need in their quest to generate cryptocurrency. In the case of the MrbMiner exploit, numerous SQL Servers have been exploited with brute-force attacks. These attacks are scanning for servers exposed directly to the internet and are using…
Read more
In my last post, I wrote about a new option in Azure – shared disks. Have you ever needed to build a Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) in Azure? This post will provide a few steps to get you started. To follow along with the demo, you’ll need an Azure account (available for free here )…
Read more
Azure offers a large array of options when it comes to high availability and disaster recovery. Failover clustered instances (FCIs) is a well known option, for SQL Server, that’s been available for years on premises. However, FCIs traditionally required shared storage. New versions of the Windows OS and SQL Server now support other options such…
Read more
Most of what you see in this post is similar to our prior post in the series – Azure shared disks – Failover Clustered Instance – SQL Server 2016. The key difference when setting up Failover Clustered Instances with SQL Server 2019 in Azure is we’re not going to utilize an Azure Load Balancer to…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
“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…
Read more
Recent Comments