Microsoft SQL Server in practice: installation, Always On availability groups, backup and restore, performance tuning, security, PowerShell automation, SQL Server on Linux and upgrades.
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 of the main conference. Morning Kick-Off: Sponsors and Opening The day started with a short introduction and a presentation of…
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 first day was fully dedicated to pre-conference workshops. The general sessions are scheduled for the following two days. In this…
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 Ward announcing the news can be found here: Announcing SQL Server 2025 Public Preview In his post you’ll find a…
Managing SQL Server trace flags effectively is a common task for DBAs and system engineers, especially when tuning the SQL Server behavior for specific use cases or performance optimizations. While trace flags can be enabled programmatically using T-SQL commands such as DBCC TRACEON, this approach has an inherent limitation: the flags are session-based or global only until the SQL Server…
For the time being Windows PowerShell 5.1 is installed with Windows Server. It means that if you want to use or even test PowerShell 7 you need to install it by your own.To be honest, even if I’m using PowerShell as a DBA more or less every day, I did not take too much care of PowerShell 7 until I…
After successfully completing several customer projects involving Delphix products, Data Virtualization and Data Masking, I decided to set up a complete infrastructure internally to test the combination of both products. Delphix Data Virtualization Creates only a virtual copy of your database blocks instead of a full physical copy. For example this allows making a new big database available only in…
Azure Database watcher is a managed monitoring service designed to provide insights and diagnostics for Azure databases and Azure Managed Instance. It helps database administrators and developers track performance, detect anomalies and troubleshoot issues efficiently. By collecting telemetry data, logs and metrics, Azure Database watcher enables proactive monitoring and alerting, ensuring database health and optimal performance. Moreover, Database watcher is…
A client submitted the following issues : During an audit of their environment, we also noticed that the database data files were hosted on a volume using an MBR partition type (which is limited to 2 TB). 2 tables were involved (but only one needed to be partitioned, the “Data” table) because we had a foreign key constraint between the…
Recently I was called by a customer because the failover on a SQL server AlwaysOn 2 nodes cluster does not work. I connect to the first node of AlwaysOn cluster who is the primary and check the cluster with the Failover Cluster Manager. Nothing tells us that it is not working. All is green! It’s a good point! I connect…
During the last years working with customers and teaching them in security topics, I realised that a lot of DBAs are not familiar with or aware of the differences between the two “owner” existing in SQL Server. That’s why I decided to write a blog about it. Well, in SQL Server we are dealing with two principals in terms of…
Terraform is a strong open-source declarative and platform agnostic infrastructure as code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp. It facilitates the deployment and whole management of infrastructure. In this hands on blog I will show you how you can use Terraform to automate your cloud deployments in Azure. Initial Setup: For this blog I’m using a ubuntu server as a automation…
A few days ago a customer called me to ask if I could help him with a problem with the log file. He tried to shrink it, but the system wasn’t doing anything and he didn’t know why. With the column ‘log_reuse_wait_desc’ you can find it out. When I asked him what was in the ‘log_reuse_wait_desc’ column for the database, there…
