Database management

Green SQL Server DBA Tips #2 – When logs and history records cause your database to growth and crash

How often do I come across this sort of problem when visiting clients? Even more with our customers’ service desk (support) SLAs. We turn up on a Monday morning and there are alerts from the weekend saying(…)

Green SQL Server DBA Tips  #1 – Are unnecessary indexes cluttering up your database?

This summer I start a series of blog posts on the ‘green SQL Server DBA’, as it’s a topic that continues to interest me and one that hasn’t been covered very much so far. I hope you’ll enjoy my(…)

Highly Available, Load-Balanced PostgreSQL with Patroni, HAProxy, and Keepalived

Patroni runs your PostgreSQL cluster and handles failover, promoting a replica the moment the primary dies and recording the change in its distributed store (etcd, Consul, or ZooKeeper). That part works on its own. Your applications still need(…)

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(…)