SQL Server

How Windows Admin Center can backup on Azure

To be honest I never used before Windows Admin Center but after some hours of utilization I’m still convinced. As SQL Server Management Studio is a great tool to manage our SQL Server instances with a CMS (Centralized Management Server),(…)

How to run Avamar backup on SQL Agent Job with PowerShell

By one of our customer we use Avamar for the backup and restore solution. I was asked by this customer to find a solution to run Avamar backups for a group of databases on a specified instance. In fact,(…)

SQL Server: Quickly clean backup history with dbatools

I just had to restore a database in production for my customer. Before doing the restore I have the habit to query the msdb.dbo.backupset table to get an overview of the last backups. When running my query, I felt it(…)

SQL Server Tool: MSSQL-CLI

MSSQL-CLI is a useful new command line tool. Not so new because this tool exist since 2018 but a little bit unknow. You find this tool on GitHub here. One of the(…)

SQL Server: Collect Page Split events using Extended Event session

Earlier this week someone tried to show me how to capture page split events using Extended Events (XE) but unfortunately, the demo failed. This is a good opportunity for me to refresh my knowledge about page split and set up(…)

How SQL Server MVCC compares to Oracle and PostgreSQL

By Franck Pachot . Microsoft SQL Server has implemented MVCC in 2005, which has been proven to be the best approach for transaction isolation (the I in ACID) in OLTP. But are you sure that writers do not block readers(…)

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(…)

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 – 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(…)

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(…)