A couple of days ago, I faced a weird backup issue with SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups at one of my customer (thank to him to point out this issue 🙂 ). After installing our DMK tool (Database Management Kit) about database maintenance for AlwaysOn, my customer noticed that their databases have not backed up. Ouch … what’s going…
Last night, I had an interesting discussion with one of my MVP French friend that faces a weird situation where a query that uses a statement level RECOMPILE hint produces an execution plan that disappointed him. He told me we can simulate the same situation by using the AdventureWorks database and Sales.SalesOrderHeader table. First, we have to add a nonclustered…
Which DBA has not yet face a performance problem issued by several blocked processes? In reality, I’m sure a very little number of them. Troubleshooting a blocked issue scenario is not always easy and may require to use some useful tools to simplify this hard task. A couple of months ago, I had to deal this scenario at one of…
A couple of days ago, I encountered an interesting case with a customer concerning a rebuild index operation on a datawarehouse environment. Let me introduce the situation: a “usual DBA day” with an almost usual error message found in your dedicated mailbox: “The transaction log for database ‘xxx’ is full”. After checking the concerned database, I notice that its transaction…
Last week I gave a workshop about SQL Server 2014 and the new features. The first day we worked on new In-memory OLTP and different topics such as the new internal storage, the new transaction processing behavior or the new checkpointing process. During this day, one of the attendees asked me about the memory management with In-Memory OLTP feature. It…
After giving my session about SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups at the last French event “Les journées SQL Server 2014”, I had several questions concerning the port conflict issues, particularly the differences that exist between FCIs and availability groups (AAGs) on this subject. In fact, in both cases, we may have port conflicts depending on which components that are…
Recently I had the opportunity to audit a SQL Server database hosted on a Hyper-V 2012 cluster. I noticed that the guest operating system had the Power Plan configured to High performance. This is great thing but when I talked to the system administrator to verify if the same option is turned on on the Hyper-V operating system, this was unfortunately…
When I have to install a virtualized SQL Server FCI at a customer place as an SQL Server consultant, the virtualized environment usally is ready. I guess this is the same for most part of the database consulting people. Since we therefore lack practice, I have to admit that we do not always know the good configuration settings to apply…
During a workshop at one of my customer about the implementation of SQL Server AlwaysOn and availability groups, I had an interesting discussion. It was about asynchronous replication between 2 replicas and the effect of the forced failover operation with allowed data loss. Does SQL Server resynchronize availability databases if I loose some transactions during the failover process? The quick…
This week, I discovered a new enhancement which is not hidden but not really visible in SQL Server 2014. Among Hekaton and other new features in SQL Server 2014, a little option appears in table creation.8-O On the msdn website, we can see a new section in the “CREATE TABLE” code: We can directly create an index in the…
When you learn about SQL Server, you will often hear that a commit transaction is a synchronous operation and that you can trust it. In this blog post, I will provide some details about what we mean by synchronous behavior. The reason is that sometimes, when I talk about the new delayed durability feature provided by SQL Server 2014, there…
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, backup & restore can also be enabled via SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Concept This feature is…
