You can register today and save for the next few days. It’s only £799 for the full SQL Bits 2019 conference until Saturday. If you’ve ever  been, you know this is the best SQL Server conference out there, at least, that’s how I feel, and I go to a lot… Read more

Last week the Tiger Team released their Availability Group Failover Detection Utility which will provide root cause analysis on Cluster Logs, SQL Error Logs, and the Availability groups extended events logs. There is a blog post here and the tool can be downloaded from the Tiger Team GitHub Repository

A…

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Midlands PASS won’t be holding a meeting in December. Too much going on! However, we are hosting meetings in January and February.

January 8, 2019 – Moving Data with Azure Data Factory

Andy Leonard (twitter | website) joins us to discuss Azure Data Factory. Learn from one of… Read more

With data lakes becoming very popular, a common question I have been hearing often from customers is, “Should I load structured/relational data into my data lake?”.  I talked about this a while back in my blog post What is a data lake? and will expand on it in this blog.… Read more

As a Database Administrator, something that should be part of your database audit is monitoring the growth of files. That means tracking when the log file grows and tracking when the data file(s) grow(s). Many will argue that there is nothing worse than not knowing when a database-related file changed… Read more

My holiday week did not started off very good.  I come in and find a UAT environment database in suspect mode.  Having a database in suspect mode means a few different things could have happened.  Some of the reasons why a databases goes to suspect mode are:

1.  Files associated to…

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Watch this week’s episode on YouTube.

Following up on last week’s post about the different types of SQL injection, this week I want to show how injection can be used to obtain a SQL login and its password.

My goal with today’s post is to show how easy… Read more

In the spirit of “do more” we’re hoping to host at least 4 pre-cons in Orlando in 2019. Right now we’re looking for ideas for the first one to be held sometime in March 2019. If you’re interested, here’s how we do it:

• We have a meeting space that seats…

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Someone asked a question about TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) and DDM (Dynamic Data Masking), which are two different technologies that are in the security area. As I’ve mentioned in the Stairway to Dynamic Data Masking, DDM is not a security technology. It makes programming some obfuscation easy, but it’s… Read more

In the past 5 months I have started two different jobs, so that leaves it up in the air as to which job or jobs (plus a previous job did some of these) are practicing these bad habits but these are the top 10 things that drive DBAs crazy when… Read more

The question that came up during a recent class I was teaching was: What if you have a plan guide to get the plan you want, but then decide, instead of using the plan guide, you’ll just force the plan? Ummmm…. No idea. Let’s test it. First, Create a Plan… Read more

Following an upgrade to SQL Server the backup share had a number of backups, some from the old version and some from the newer version. I was asked if I had a script to be able to get the SQL Version from the backup file from all of the files… Read more

A while back I wrote about how to find where your backups are. And I’ve also written about I use a solution in SSMS to hold a bunch of my scripts. I was using this again today (I use it a lot!) and thought I would bring… Read more

Yes Virginia, there are ghosts in your database.  More specifically, there are ghosts in your SQL Server database.  They are not there to haunt you.  They are not there just for this holiday season (speaking of Halloween Month).

How can there be ghosts in the database?

Why would there be… Read more

(Be sure to checkout the FREE SQLpassion Performance Tuning Training Plan - you get a weekly email packed with all the essential knowledge you need to know about performance tuning on SQL Server.)

In one of my last blog postings I have shown you how I run SQL Server natively… Read more

Part of the decision of setting up a non profit is committing to a bit more than minimal effort when it comes to keeping track of the money. We’re still early days on that journey but I thought I’d share some of what we have set up so far.

We… Read more

Troubleshooting steps to do when we cannot start SQL service and receive this alert.

Run –> eventvwr –> windows log –> system and filter the errors and read one by one. You can get a hint that what is the real issue.

OR open the SQL server errorlog and read.… Read more

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Since SQL Server 2014 SP1 we’ve had DMV’s that can support Live Query Statistics (Basically a query plan that gives you feedback as it runs). If you’ve not seen this before then you can give it a go by…

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