Tag: Database

Reducing Business Risks for a SQL Server Estate

Reducing Business Risks for a SQL Server Estate

Your SQL Servers are the backbone of your company’s data operations. They power critical applications and store valuable information. They enable financial decisions, undergird operational activities, and support your sales processes. But what happens if there’s a problem? What happens when data is lost or corrupted? Or if one of your key systems is down…
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Streamline your failovers with contained Availability Groups

Streamline SQL Server Management with Contained Availability Groups

SQL Server Availability Groups can present challenges after a failover, such as missing logins, outdated passwords, or absent SQL Server Agent jobs. Some clients address these issues by requiring the primary replica to remain on the same instance. If a failover occurs due to an outage or patching, they generally request to revert the AG…
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Manually Adjusting Compatibility Level Settings in SQL Server

A Manual Adjustment: Compatibility Level Settings in SQL Server

A database on a specific SQL Server version doesn’t automatically have all features enabled. For example, a database on SQL Server 2019 can still use SQL Server 2014 compatibility, missing some 2019 features. Each database has a Compatibility Level setting that activates certain features of its version. When SQL Server 2014 introduced the Cardinality Estimator,…
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When (Not) to Use NOLOCK

Quick Tips for Faster SQL Servers: When (Not) to Use NOLOCK

Many developers mistakenly use WITH (NOLOCK) in their SELECT statements without fully understanding its effects. While they might aim to speed up queries or prevent deadlocking, NOLOCK can actually lead to invalid results. What does NOLOCK do? A SELECT statement in SQL Server locks data to prevent modifications during querying. The lock is released after…
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A team gathered to build an Availability Group together.

Building an Availability Group? Involve Key Players First.

So, you’ve decided your organization’s data needs to remain highly available. Given the options in SQL Server, you’ve decided an Availability Group makes the most sense for your scenario. What’s next? Involve Stakeholders Early in the Process of Building a SQL Server Availability Group Before jumping into building your Availability Group, it’s crucial to identify…
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Image of a lost person reading a road map. This is your SQL Server when you use the "sp_" prefix to name a stored procedure and send it the long way around.

Quick Tips for Faster SQL Servers: Don’t Name Your Stored Procedures Using The “sp_” Prefix

A common mistake database developers make in SQL Server is naming their stored procedures with the “sp_” prefix. Organizations sometimes even adopt this as a standard convention (along with the “tbl_” prefix for tables!). So, why is this considered a bad practice? It’s inefficient. The “sp_” prefix is used by SQL Server to designate internal…
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Check your SQL Server's code compatibility with Azure so you don't step in it.

Is your SQL Server Code Ready for Azure?

I recently had a discussion with a client that turned to the question of SQL Server code compatibility with Azure SQL Database. We were designing a new pipeline for their on-premises SQL environment, and they mentioned their abandoned cloud migration effort from a few years earlier. The business ended up pausing this effort because of…
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High availability options--which one should you choose?

Availability Groups: What’s Right for Your Business?

I’ve had several companies inquire about SQL Server’s built-in high availability options over the years. This conversation usually indicates a need to ensure that their database systems remain operational and accessible with minimal downtime. But why now? They’ve been in business for years and are just now interested in HA/DR. What changed? Reasons vary, but…
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Overcome the roadblocks between you and a better SQL Environment

“We Want a Better SQL Environment, Just Not Yet.”

No one wants a slow, unreliable SQL Server that leaks data like a sieve. No, they want a fast, reliable, and secure database environment. However, they may not want it right now. Creating a better SQL environment can wait until later, right? It might seem that way, but the risks will only grow while you…
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Take steps to improve your SQL environment

The Perfect SQL Server: Striving for Excellence in an Imperfect World

Does the perfect SQL Server exist? And what would that even look like? Let’s think about it for a moment. If the perfect SQL Server exists, it would be flawlessly tuned for its workload. It would have the ideal amount of hardware resources, and its settings would be perfectly optimized. The perfect SQL Server would…
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