SQL Server 2014

SQL Server: DBCC CHECKDB does not detect corruption

During my audits at customer places, it still happens very often to find SQL Server databases with page verification option configured to “none”. I always alert my customers on this configuration point because it can have an impact on the(…)

Backup a SQL Server database from On-Premise to Azure

SQL Server database backup & restore from On-Premise to Azure is a feature introduced with SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2. In the past, it could be used with these three tools: Transact-SQL (T-SQL) PowerShell SQL Server Management Objects (SMO) With(…)

SQL Server 2014: Are DENY ‘SELECT ALL USERS SECURABLES’ permissions sufficient for DBAs?

SQL Server 2014 improves the segregation of duties by implementing new server permissions. The most important is the SELECT ALL USERS SECURABLES permission that will help to restrict database administrators from viewing data in all databases. My article is(…)

SQL Server 2014: sys.dm_exec_query_profiles, a new promising feature

Among the hidden features provided by SQL Server 2014 there is a very interesting dynamic management view named sys.dm_exec_query_profiles. This feature will help the database administrators and experienced developers to troubleshoot long running queries in real-time. I’m pretty sure(…)

SQL Server 2014: Availability groups failover impossible with Failover Cluster Manager

A couple of weeks ago, I worked for a customer that wanted to implement SQL Server 2012 (and not SQL Server 214) AlwaysOn with availability groups. During our tests we performed a bunch of failover tests and the customer(…)

Tempdb enhancements with SQL Server 2014

SQL Server 2014 is definitively designed for performance and I will try to demonstrate it during this blog post. I like to talk about hidden performance features because generally it does not require any changes for applications unlike in-memory(…)

Check SQL Server Error Log size with a policy

In many blogs or articles, we can read that it is recommended to recycle the error log to be sure that the size is not too big In the Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) for SQL Server, this(…)

SQL Server 2014: SELECT INTO operators can run in parallel

A couple of weeks ago, I had to provide some best practices in term of architecture for a “heavy writes” environment that consists in importing data from different sources into SQL Server tables. At the customer place, I was(…)

SQL Server 2014: In-Memory tables, Bw-Tree, and storage

SQL Server 2014 introduces hash indexes with in-memory optimized tables. I described some of their aspects in a previous blog post.  These indexes are very efficient with lookup search operations but have some limitations with operations(…)

SQL Server 2014: Buffer pool extension – an interesting new feature

Buffer pool extension (aka BPE) is an interesting feature of SQL Server 2014. Database administrators already know that memory is one of the key assets available for SQL Server. This is especially true for buffer pool memory, which plays(…)