Steven Naudet

SQL Server CPU limitation for Express and Standard Edition

Introduction When performing an audit on an SQL Server VM the first thing the system administrator told me was that there’s no issue with the CPU on this box, the monitoring shows it’s always around 50% usage. Problem Here is(…)

SQL Server: Get email notifications for Error Log entries

Introduction In a previous blog post, I did a T-SQL script reading Audit files to send emails with valuable information about instance changes. In this one, you will see how to get nice emails from critical errors or(…)

SQL Server: How to delete the msdb backup history kindly

This week I noticed some slowness on queries related to backup history. The instance had a huge msdb database (more than 10GB size), the backup history had never been purged. I already wrote a post on this topic and(…)

SQL Server: Audit changes on Instance Configuration, Linked Servers and Agent Jobs

Introduction Very often with our customers, there is only one person with the DBA role. The configuration of the instances is then under control and if anything strange has to be questioned, the culprit is quickly identified. 🙂 When(…)

SQL Server connectivity issue – troubleshoot TLS configuration

In the blog post, I will share a case of troubleshooting a connectivity issue with SQL Server. The problem occurred in a migration context. The SQL Server databases (in version 2008 to 2014) from multiple applications were consolidated on a(…)

SQL Server: Create a Shared Storage for your Failover Cluster LAB

I’m currently working on the migration of a Failover Clustered SSAS instance from Windows Server 2012 to Windows Server 2019. The context is quite complex and in order to choose the right migration scenario I need to play with it(…)

SQL Server: Control the size of your Transaction Log file with Resumable Index Rebuild

Introduction In this blog post, I will demonstrate how the Resumable capability of Online index rebuild operation can help you to keep the transaction log file size under control. An index rebuild operation is done in a single transaction(…)

SQL Server TCP: Having both Dynamic Ports and Static Port configured

Introduction Have you ever seen an SQL Server instance configured to listen on both “TCP Dynamic Ports” and “TCP (static) Port”? This kind of configuration can be caused by the following scenario: A named instance is installed. By default, it(…)

Validate your SQL Server infrastructure with dbachecks

Introduction In this blog post, I’ll do an introduction to the PowerShell module dbachecks. dbachecks uses Pester and dbatools to validate your SQL Server infrastructure. With very minimal configuration you can check that(…)

An Introduction to Pester – Unit Testing and Infrastructure checks in PowerShell

Introduction If you never heard of it, Pester is a PowerShell module, written in PowerShell. It’s a framework for writing and running unit tests, integration tests, and also infrastructure checks as we will see in a moment.