Here we are at the dawn of a new year. It’s a great time to pause and reflect on your personal and professional goals. How did you do in 2021? If you’re responsible for SQL Server environment, you probably included goals for the SQL Servers. Maybe you wanted to increase performance? Or, maybe you set…
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“Oh, we use VM snapshots to backup our SQL Servers.” We sometimes hear this when talking with companies, especially when we’re delivering a SQL Server Health Check Assessment. And why not? It makes sense. Companies take snapshots of their file servers. They snapshot of their web servers before upgrades. FTP servers, Citrix servers, and even…
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Do you schedule DBCC CHECKDB for all of your important databases? Scheduling database integrity checks ranks right up there with backing up your databases when it comes to glamorous activities in the life of a DBA. That is to say, it’s not glamorous at all. Integrity checks don’t bring the same internal swagger as say…
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Don’t sweat the small stuff, they say. That’s good advice. Much of the time. But with SQL Server, the small stuff is worth sweating. In fact, the small stuff can be big. Letting the small stuff go In life, the small stuff can weigh you down. Worrying about things that don’t really matter can strip…
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In Getting Started with SQL Server in a Docker Container, I shared my SQL Server Docker container configuration. I described how to copy database backup files from your host to the container and then restore them in the container. That’s my usual approach. But what if you wanted the database to reside on the host…
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You’ve probably heard of running SQL Server in a Docker container. The technology has been around for some years now. However it’s still unexplored territory for many. A SQL Server Docker container image is a lightweight and standalone package that includes everything needed to run SQL Server. It’s often used in DevOps as part of…
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How many tempdb data files should a SQL Server have? And where should they live? What about their growth settings? Should it be by percent? Or, should they grow by a certain size each time? Are there other tempdb configuration settings I should be concerned with? In short: how should I configure my SQL Server…
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Have you seen the job boards recently? Hiring an experienced full-time DBA is expensive. And many companies simply cannot justify that kind of spend for a full time DBA, especially if they have fewer than a couple of dozen instances of SQL Servers in production. The result? Many companies are working without a SQL Server…
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Hardening and protecting your SQL Server environment is not a one-and-done task. It’s a continuous process. Things change. New Applications are added. Logins come and go. Servers are migrated. In such a dynamic environment, auditing data access in your SQL Server environment is critical. If you are responsible for SQL Servers, you likely ask: Who…
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You’re cleaning up some old usernames in a database. The users are no longer needed so you want to drop them and maybe even the server login. You issue the standard DROP USER username; command in the query editor and it immediately comes back with Msg 15138, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The database…
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