Database Administration & Monitoring

Random permission denied when backing up SQL Server databases to AWS Storage Gateway

Before addressing the issue of backup size reduction with compression enabled, let me provide some context. When SQL Server is hosted on AWS EC2 instances, you’ll need to manage the backup strategy appropriate to your business. In order to persist(…)

SQL Server 2025 – AG Commit Time

SQL Server 2025 preview has been publicly available for a week now: you can find all the details in this blog “SQL Server 2025 Public Preview and SSMS 21 now available“.In this blog, I want to make an highlight(…)

SQL Server 2025 – Backups to secondary replicas of an availability group

Backup operations can increase significantly I/O and even CPU utilization when we use backup compression. To avoid using resources on primary replica, offloading backups to a synchronized or synchronizing replicas seems to be the good solution even if we have(…)

SQL Server 2025 – ZSTD – A new compression algorithm for backups

Introduction SQL Server 2025 introduces a new algorithm for backup compression: ZSTD. As a result, SQL Server 2025 now offers three solutions for backup compression: MS_XPRESS QAT ZSTD In this blog, we will compare MS_XPRESS and ZSTD. Environment To perform(…)

Using dlt to get data from Db2 to PostgreSQL

For a recent project at one of our customers we needed to get data from a Db2 database into PostgreSQL. The first solution we thought of was the foreign data wrapper for Db2. This is usually(…)

SQL Server 2025 – Standard Developer edition

Introduction The arrival of SQL Server 2025 introduces the Standard Developer edition, allowing companies to deploy across all development, quality and testing environments using an edition equivalent to the Standard Edition without having to pay the associated licensing fees. Here(…)

SQLDay 2025 – Wrocław – Sessions

After a packed workshop day, the SQLDay conference officially kicked off on Tuesday with a series of sessions covering cloud, DevOps, Microsoft Fabric, AI, and more. Here is a short overview of the sessions I attended on the first day(…)

SQLDay 2025 – Wrocław – Workshops

I had the chance to attend SQLDay 2025 in Wrocław, one of the largest Microsoft Data Platform conferences in Central Europe. The event gathers a wide range of professionals, from database administrators to data engineers and Power BI developers. The(…)

SQL Server 2025 Public Preview and SSMS 21 now available

This is a short blog post to share that the SQL Server 2025 public preview is now available for download. At the same time, SSMS 21 has also been released and is now generally available. The LinkedIn post by Bob(…)

2025.pgconf.de recap

( note: I am writing this as member of the pgconf.de organization team, and not as a dbi services employee ) After almost half a year of planning and preparation PostgreSQL Conference Germany 2025 finally took(…)