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SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server in practice: installation, Always On availability groups, backup and restore, performance tuning, security, PowerShell automation, SQL Server on Linux and upgrades.

Running SQL Server on the Oracle Free tier

By Franck Pachot The Oracle Cloud is not only for Oracle Database. You can create a VM running Oracle Linux with full root access to it, even in the free tier: a free VM that will be always up, never expires, with full ssh connectivity to a sudoer user, where you are able to tunnel any port. Of course, there… 

One day training @ Microsoft Azure Cloud Workshop

Today, with my colleague Christophe, we follow the Microsoft Azure Training Day: Data and Analytics @ Microsoft Zürich (Wallisellen to be exact). After a presentation of SQL Server 2019, we begin with the First Lab about SQL Server 2019 and new features and we going through intelligent query processing, Data Discovery and Classification for personally identifiable information (PII) and General… 

SQL Server – Collecting last backup information in an AlwaysOn environment

Introduction Sometimes you face interesting challenges with unusual environment. One of my customer needed a automated and flexible backup solution. Said like that nothing very complex you will say. But if I mention that some databases were 60TB big with more than 30 filegroups and around 600 database data files each and moreover synchronized in an AlwayOn availability group, it… 

SQL Server 2019 Accelerated Database Recovery – Instantaneous rollback and aggressive log truncation

In my previous article about Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR), I wrote mostly about the new Persistent Volume Store (PVS), how important it was important in the new SQL database engine recovery process and the potential impact it may have on the application workload. This time let’s talk a little bit more about ADR feature benefits we may get with instantaneous… 

Using non-root SQL Server containers on Docker and K8s

This is something that I waited for a while, in fact since SQL Server 2017 … and the news came out on Wednesday 09th September 2019. Running Non-Root SQL Server Containers is now possible either on the next version of SQL Server (2019) and it has been backported on SQL Server 2017 as well. Non-root SQL Server containers will likely… 

When Read-Scale availability groups and Windows Failover Cluster are not good friends

A couple of days ago, with some fellow French data platform MVPS (@thesqlgrrrl and @Conseilit) we discussed an issue around Read-Scale availability groups and it made me think I had forgotten to share about a weird behavior I experienced with them.   Basically, Read-Scale availability groups are clusterless infrastructures meaning there is no need to install an underlying cluster. Obviously,… 

Introducing Accelerated Database Recovery with SQL Server 2019

SQL Server 2019 RC1 was released out a few weeks ago and it is time to start blogging about my favorite core engine features that will be shipped with the next version of SQL Server. Things should not be completely different with the RTM, so let’s introduce the accelerated database recovery (aka ADR) which is mainly designed to solve an… 

Debugging SQL Server containers considerations

When it comes to troubleshooting processes or to get a deeper look of how SQL Server works internally , I always used debugging tools as windbg on Windows and since SQL Server is available on Linux, I switched to strace tool. But let’s add containers in the game now. I didn’t want to touch any based image for applications including… 

SQL Server 2019: Java in SQL Server hard to believe, no?

It has already been a few months that we are testing the next version of SQL Server: SQL Server 2019. I already blogged about a previous version of SQL Server supporting R and Python. With the new version of SQL Server 2019, Java will also be integrated. The Java runtime used is Zulu Open JRE and can be tested from… 

Deploying SQL Server 2019 container on RHEL 8 with podman

Having a fresh install of RHEL8 on my lab environment, I was curious to take a look at new containerization stuff from Red Hat in the context of SQL Server 2019. Good chances are the future version of SQL Server should be available and supported on with the latest version of Red Hat but for now this blog post is… 

SQL Server 2019 availability group R/W connection redirection, routing mesh and load balancing

SQL Server 2019 availability group feature will provide secondary to primary replica read/write connection redirection. I wrote about it in a previous blog post here. It consists in redirecting client application connections to the primary replica regardless of the target server specified in the connections string. That’s pretty interesting in some scenarios as read scale-out or specific multi-subnet configurations where… 

Microsoft Inspire Partner Event 2019 / Day 1

dbi services at Microsoft Inspire Conference Summary of my first participation – Day 1 After 20 years in the business of IT Infrastructure, time has come to open my mind 😉 and Microsoft Inspire is the perfect opportunity. It is a partner conference that has quite a different approach compared to other software editors I worked for (e.g. Oracle). Indeed,…