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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Ding! Your desktop IM client chimes. “Any idea how long my SQL Server backup/restore will take to complete? I think it may be stuck.” Someone has started a database restore (or backup) using a T-SQL command. Now he wants to know how long the process will take to complete. He’s gone to the bathroom and…
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T minus 7 days. One of the biggest events of the year for data professionals is just one week away. The PASS Summit in Seattle, Washington, kicks off on November 6, 2018. Each year the event draws thousands of attendees from around the globe for three days of intensive learning, engaging networking, and embracing camaraderie.…
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“Should I install SQL Server 2017 now? Or wait until SQL Server 2019?” One of our Remote DBA clients recently asked me that question. They have a set of aging SQL Server 2008 R2 instances used for production, test, and development. SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 Extended Support ends July 9, 2019, and the…
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Just when we thought that most cybersecurity attacks came via social engineering, we see this. Attacks on IIS, Microsoft’s web server, increased from 2,000 in Q1 2018 to over 1.7 million in Q2 2018. That’s a mind-boggling 782x increase! This is according to an esentire Security Advisory released last week. Hackers go-to tool of choice? PowerShell was the most commonly…
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“The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from,” quipped renown computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum. In the SQL Server world, we have industry best practices. These are guidelines that most every knowledgeable database professional will agree is a good idea or a good baseline. Sure there are exceptions, specific tweaks…
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