Microsoft SQL Server in practice: installation, Always On availability groups, backup and restore, performance tuning, security, PowerShell automation, SQL Server on Linux and upgrades.
Few months ago I attended to the Franck Pachot session about Microservices and databases at SOUG Romandie in Lausanne on 2019 May 21th. He covered some performance challenges that can be introduced by Microservices architecture design and especially when database components come into the game with chatty applications. One year ago, I was in a situation where a customer installed…
We are entering now to the infrastructure as code world and provisioning a SQL Server infrastructure is not excluded from the equation. This is especially true when it comes the Cloud regardless we are using IaaS or PaaS. One great tool to use in such scenario is certainly terraform and I introduced it during the last PowerSaturday pre-conference named “DBA…
I got recently the 4.08 update from the Windocks team and I was very excited to evaluate some of new features. The first cool one I want to present in this blog concerns the Kubernetes support for deploying Windocks containers that will make my application deployment definitely easier. Let’s say you want to deploy your application that is tied to…
Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) which gives us the possibility to create application with a performant database without to take care of the relying infrastructure. Azure SQL Database is based on the latest stable version of Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine. We have the choose between 2 purchasing models: a vCore-based purchasing model and a DTU-based (Database…
In this blog post let’s go back to the roots (DBA concern) with a discussion with one of my friends about a weird transaction locking issue. In fact, this discussion was specifically around two questions. The first one was why SQL Server continues to use shared locks in RCSI mode leading to blocking scenarios and the second one was about…
During the last DevOps Day in Geneva, I presented a sample of our CI implementation related to our MSSQL DMK maintenance product. It was definitely a very good experience for me and good opportunity to get feedback from DevOps community as well. During the session I explained our CI pipeline includes SQL Server containers both on AKS (K8s as managed…
It has been while since my last blog. Today it is about continuing with helm charts and how to upgrade / downgrade SQL Server containers to a specific cumulative update. My first write-up in my to-do list. Last year, I wrote an introduction of SQL Server containers on K8s. I remembered to face some issues when testing upgrade scenarios (probably…
Few days ago, a customer asks me if it is possible to move the history table to slower but cheaper storage. The question behind this is whether it is possible to create a history table on a separate filegroup and file. Few years ago, I write a serie of blogs about temporal table here. I will take the same example…
This write-up follows my first article about helm chart with SQL Server. This time, I would like to cover the availability groups topic and how to deploy them with helm charts. In fact, to go through this feature for AGs was motivated to its usage in our Azure DevOps CI pipeline in order to deploy a configurable one on an…
Integration catalog is easy to work with and the environments feature is as well very convenient. In SQL Server management Studio, there are a lot of features available to administrate your SQL Server instances, but some are missing that can be very useful. You have the possibility to move an SSISDB environment but this is only possible in another folder…
Last blog of this year 2018 with SQL databases and Cloud Azure and this is not trivial choice. <Speculation mode> I would say year 2019 could be important for all stakeholders. Cloud transformation has begun in many forms at customer shops and we heard about some big actors who are coming in Switzerland including Azure or Google. Data Platforms services…
Did you ever use the famous DBCC PAGE command? Folks who are interested in digging further to the SQL Server storage already use it for a while. We also use it during our SQL Server performance workshop by the way. But the usage of such command may sometimes go beyond and it may be used for some troubleshooting scenarios. For…
