We’ve made it! The start of a new year. Now is a great time to reflect on what you’d like to accomplish over the next 12 months at work, and more specifically, what you would like to do with your SQL Server environment this year. To help with that, here are five activities or goals…
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In SQL Server, when someone creates a database, they own it. That means they have elevated permissions on the database. The SQL Server database owner can change configuration parameters, perform maintenance, and grant permissions on the database to other users. The database owner can even drop the database altogether. In highly secure environments (and what…
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Securing and protecting your SQL Servers from the ever present threats of data breaches, ransomware, and even accidental data losses due to errant code or faulty systems is crucial. It’s one of the core responsibilities of a DBA. It would be great if there was a one-size fits all approach to data protection – one…
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Fortunately, DBCC CHECKDB will log each time it completes without finding any errors or corruption in the database. That’s known as the Last Known Good date. Let’s look at three ways you determine the Last Known Good date. We’ll use a T-SQL query, a PowerShell command with dbatools, and the SQL Server Logs via Management Studio.
Checking the number of tempdb data files is straightforward. Here are three easy ways: one graphical, one T-SQL, and one PowerShell, so you can use your tools of choice.
We’re often asked about SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) options to help customers protect their data and improve their uptime. No surprise there. When a SQL Server provides a critical component of your daily operations you need those databases to be available. Simply put, when a user needs information from the database…
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Do All SQL Servers Need to Be Upgraded? Running production systems on a platform that is no longer supported by the vendor is worrisome. If something goes wrong, you’ll no longer be able to call the vendor and receive technical support. But worse, you’ll no longer release updates, fixes, security patches, etc, for the out…
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“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…
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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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