Database management

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups and Database Master Keys: A Hidden Failover Pitfall

I recently came across an interesting case involving a client whose application used SQL Server symmetric keys to encrypt sensitive data. The database was hosted in an Always On Availability Group environment for high-availability and disaster-recovery. The interesting(…)

Data Point Prague 2026

For the first time, I joined some days ago the Data Point Prague . The biggest International Data Conference in Prague. A two-day event dedicated to advancing knowledge in data technologies. Thanks to dbi-services to let me(…)

SQL Server Snapshot Backup and Restore with Proxmox ZFS – REST API with SQL Server 2025 (3/3)

The proposed architecture consists in adding a small internal REST API on the Proxmox server in order to expose a controlled ZFS snapshot operation. SQL Server 2025 can then call this API through sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint, instead of running SSH commands(…)

SQL Server Snapshot Backup and Restore with Proxmox ZFS – Powershell implementation (2/3)

In the previous section, we discussed the drawbacks of running the commands manually. Indeed, the manual process was taking too much time and could directly impact the database state while the freeze was occurring. To address this issue,(…)

SQL Server Snapshot Backup and Restore with Proxmox ZFS (1/3)

We are currently working with clients on migrations to SQL Server 2022 and SQL Server 2025. During a discussion with one client, we reviewed some of the benefits introduced in the latest SQL Server 2022 and 2025 releases.

When a Python driver configuration issue may cause blocking in SQL Server

One of our clients encountered blocking during their daily data load. The process loads several million rows and then performs an ALTER TABLE … SWITCH operation into a partitioned table. This operation usually takes some time, but in this(…)

A Misleading SSAS Error in Power BI Report Server When Using DirectQuery Mode

Our client was experiencing issues after publishing a report that used Direct Query mode. Specifically, when the report was queried, the following error occurred: Error :  We couldn’t connect to the Analysis Services server. Make sure you’ve entered(…)

PostgreSQL 19: Dynamically adjust the I/O worker pool

When PostgreSQL 18 was released last year one of the major features was the introduction of the asynchronous I/O subsystem. The main configuration parameter for this was (and still is)(…)

PostgreSQL 19: pg_waldump can now read from archives

When PostgreSQL 18 introduced the ability to verify tar based (and compressed) backups with pg_verifybackup there was one limitation: The verification of the WAL files in the tars (or compressed files)(…)

PostgreSQL 19: Importing statistics from remote servers

Usually we do not see many foreign data wrappers being used by our customers. Most of them use the foreign data wrapper for Oracle to fetch data from Oracle systems. Some of them use the(…)