Database Administration & Monitoring

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(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Support for asynchronous I/O

This is maybe one the biggest steps forward for PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL 18 will come with support for asynchronous I/O. Traditionally PostgreSQL relies on the operating system to hide the latency of writing to disk, which is done synchronously and can(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Add function to report backend memory contexts

Another great feature was committed for PostgreSQL 18 if you are interested how memory is used by a backend process. While you can take a look at the memory contexts for your current session since PostgreSQL 14, there was no(…)

PostgreSQL 18: Allow NOT NULL constraints to be added as NOT VALID

Before we take a look at what this new feature is about, let’s have a look at how PostgreSQL 17 (and before) handles “NOT NULL” constraints when they get created. As usual we start with a simple table: postgres=# select(…)

SQL Server AlwaysOn – Alert database Not Synchronizing / Suspect

Few days ago, through our alerting at the Service Desk, we receive an alert about a database in an AlwaysOn cluster with the message: CRITICAL: Database xxxx [replica: xxxxxx] [role: SECONDARY] state is SUSPECT, synchronization health is NOT_HEALTHY, synchronization(…)

PostgreSQL 18: “swap” mode for pg_upgrade

When you want to upgrade from one major version of PostgreSQL to another you probably want to go with pg_upgrade (or logical replication). There are several modes of operations for this already: –copy: Copy the data(…)