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What does SQL encrypt by default?
For the purposes of this, we’re ignoring SQL Server 7.0 and below.Out of the box, SQL Server will encrypt some things by default to protect you and your data. Out of the box, SQL Server will encrypt...
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When does it make sense to upgrade?
There’s a lot of versions of SQL Server available today. I’ve seen clients deploying new services on SQL Server 2015, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2017 (yes we have a client on SQL Server 2017 already)...
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Happy New Year, Welcome to 2018
It’s 2018 and welcome to it. Here’s hoping that 2018 is a easier year than 2017 was.For me, that means no brain tumor this year. Hopefully that’s a easy bar to hit.DennyThe post Happy New Year,...
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Where Denny went during PASS and Live360 Events
https://www.flickr.com/photos/128733321@N05/17222900949/inIf you were at the PASS Summit, Live360 in November, or SQL Saturday in Slovenia in December, you may have noticed that I couldn’t make it to...
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When Using Availability Group Listeners, Why Can I See Non-AG Databases?
Yep. This is actually by design; and is because listeners can be tricky little fellas. When using a SQL Server Availability Group Listener, you can see any databases on the server that is hosting the...
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VMs in Azure region can’t talk to MySQL database service in same region
I ran into an interesting issue last week. I had VMs in the US West region of Azure which was unable to talk to the MySQL database service (PaaS) also in US West. The problem is turned out was due to a...
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Can I Use Azure Threat Detection On-Premesis?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/123327536@N08/23891946434The short answer here is no. The threat detection features that you see in Azure are not available in the on-premises product. This includes VMs...
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Azure precon at SQL Grillen in June
I’m thrilled to announce that we’ll be hosting a pre-con at SQL Grillen this June in Lingen, Germany titled “Designing Azure Infrastructure for Data Platform Projects” which you can see on the events...
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Why Don’t Universal Groups Work in SQL Server?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/123327536@N08/23891946434If you’ve tried using Universal Groups in Active Directory to access your SQL Servers, you may notice that the users who are members of these...
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Denny’s first public speaking event post surgery is…
In case you didn’t catch it, I’ve been out for a while, with good reason. Apparently, emergency brain surgery takes a while to recover from. I’m not back to 100% yet, but I’ll be speaking at my first...
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But why won’t you sponsor at my event?
Being a vendor/exhibitor at a few conferences has been an eye-opening experience for sure. Sadly exhibitors can’t sponsor at all the events that are available. It used to be the case that vendors could...
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PASS Summit 2018 Here I Come
I’m thrilled to be able to say that I’ll be presenting a precon at the PASS Summit 2018. This year I’ll be giving a precon on database security. In this session we’ll be going over the various...
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TEMP is A Four Letter Word
It’s not uncommon to observe rampant over reliance of database application code on TEMP tables, most often as a SQL language programming crutch. I have a theory as to why. Programmers are chiefly...
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It’s getting all cloudy in here
Not all cloud providers are the same. Some are flexible and will grow and shrink with your needs and business (Azure, Amazon, Google Cloud), and some will not (IBM, Rackspace, Other Bare Metal clouds)....
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What Happened to My Database?
Every DBA has at some point asked: “What the heck happened to my database?” In this blog, we’ll review some of the more common scenarios where some little detail slips through the proverbial crack and...
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SQL SERVER – FIX : Error Msg 8672 – The MERGE Statement Attempted to UPDATE...
While I have been blogging about SQL Server for a long time, I still believe that there is still a lot of error which are not discovered by me. It is always fun to see new error and find a fix for the...
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#0402–SQL Server 2016 – KB3207512 fails–Msg 17054 – Unable to shutdown the...
SQL Server 2016 installations may run into some issues with patching and configuration. This post provides pointers on avoiding these.
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Monday Coffee 2017-03-13
Less than a week to go until SQLSaturday Iceland now, it’s going to be a busy couple of months for me but am looking forward to it. I’ll get my slides and demos uploaded here at some point.I’ve been...
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Extreme situations require extreme commands
The title is adapted from a child-hood movie of mine and is my daily (database-related) WTF moment and it is my entry for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday found:...
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SQL SERVER – Errorlog The Server was Unable to Initialize Encryption Because...
One of my client was trying to start SQL Service and it was failing. I asked to hare ERRORLOG so that we will get some idea about the cause. Here is the information from ERRORLOG file.2017-01-31...
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SQL SERVER – Maintenance Plan – Could not load type...
One of my client was unable to modify the maintenance plan using SSMS. When we did various tests, we found that existing maintenance plans could execute and work. We tried creating a new maintenance...
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Corrupt Database – I need that data now!
My database is in the recovery pending state and I want to get in and extract the data out into a new database, I have NO BACKUPS available so some data (even if it is dodgy) is better than nothing. …...
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PolyBase use cases clarified
I previously talked about PolyBase and its enhancements (see PASS Summit Announcements: PolyBase enhancements). There is some confusion on PolyBase use cases as they are different depending on whether...
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SQL SERVER – Availability Group Missing or Deleted Automatically?
As a part of my passion, I try to help people in fixing simple issues and explain the behavior by looking at logs. Here is an email from my friend about Availability Group Missing or Deleted...
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Microsoft Brings New Capabilities to HDInsight and DocumentDB
Microsoft is headed to San Jose this week where they will be announcing new features for HDInsight and DocumentDB at Strata Hadoop + World. Additionally, the company is also announcing a new preview...
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SQL SERVER – Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Sdk. Sfc.EnumeratorException:...
If you work with a product for a long time, you would start loving it. I have worked with many other RDBMS, but my love to SQL Server will never die. The amount of information available in logs is very...
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How to Find How Many Rows Each Query Returned Along with Execution Plan? –...
Question: How to Find How Many Rows Each Query Returned Along with Execution Plan?Answer: During my performance tuning consultancy engagement, this is one of the most asked questions. Everyone wants to...
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SQL SERVER – sp_readrequest – Long Running Process
Just another day while doing performance tuning engagement, Senior DBA of the organization and I both noticed that one of the SP sp_readrequest is continuously listed as long running SP. Well, the...
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#0403 – SQL Server – CAST/CONVERT to string – Pad zeroes or spaces to an integer
Padding zeroes to an integer is often required during data migrations and integrations. Here is the approach I use in such data conversions.
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TDE: Looking inside your database and backups
TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) encrypts the data files at rest but don’t forget that it also encrypts your backup file too. I fancied looking inside the MDF and a backup of my database before...
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SQL SERVER – DBCC SHRINKFILE: Page 1:26423878 Could not be Moved Because it...
This blog is an outcome of an email communication with my client. The issue was that they were having big tempdb files. They had multiple files and of uneven size. As soon as they restart SQL, the...
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My path from a junior to a senior DBA
A non-technical post but something I have been asked about few times so I thought that I would put pen to paper and tell you about my journey on becoming a senior DBA. You might find it fun to read....
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Partitioned Tables and ColumnStore
ColumnStore indexes are all the rage with data warehouses. They’re fast, they’re new(ish) and they solve all sorts of problems when dealing with massive amounts of data. However they can cause some...
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Should I build a 1×6 VM or a 6×1 VM?
This sort of question comes up a lot. And there’s a lot of it-depends built into the answer, so I’ll try and break this down a little bit for you. Be warned, we’re going to be talking about NUMA and...
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Azure Import Export Services – Notes from the field
One of my clients recently had the need to upload tens of terabytes of data into Azure Blob Storage. This gave us the perfect opportunity to use the Azure Import Export service to get these several...
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Your PASS Summit 2017 Speaker Idol Contestants Are…
In past years I’ve been really glad that I’m just the MC of the PASS summit speaker idol because of the strong group of speakers. This year I’m really damn glad that I’m just not a judge because of the...
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So, what’s with this whole SQL Server on Linux thing?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorserone/4775107201/in/I’ll be honest, when I first learned about SQL Server on Linux, I didn’t get it. It took like an hour for it to make sense to me. After a week...
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DR is more than just building an AG
Building, implementing and executing a proper DR plan successfully is a challenging undertaking. It is a lot more complicatedthan most experienced IT professionals and/or consultants think it is. This...
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PASS Summit Speaker Idol Lineup Change Redux
We’ve had another change to the PASS Summit speaker idol line up. Tzahi has had to withdraw due to work commitments and won’t be able to attend the PASS summit at all this year. Which is good news for...
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PASS Summit 2017 Speaker Idol Judges
I know I’ve been really slacking on getting this year judges list for speaker idol posted. A lot of this is just because of everything else that’s been going on leading up to the PASS summit,...
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Wide open steps, do not a process make
I found the above instructions on a blog post I was trying to use to fix an issue in visual studio recently. (Ignore the fact that I was in Visual Studio and focus on the screenshot.) This post has 4...
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Day 1 at the PASS Summit, Welcomes John Morehouse to DCAC
Today is Day 1 at the PASS Summit, and there’s going to be all sorts of blog posts all about what’s being announced during the keynote today (I assume). I’ll leave those announcements for others to...
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Taking Shortcuts Isn’t Worth It
Everyone takes shortcuts. It’s normal. But we shouldn’t be doing it. It comes with some disadvantages. Sometimes it doesn’t look pretty, sometimes the shortcuts cause performance problems, sometimes...
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8TB SSD in Azure vs. 8 1TB SSD in Azure
With the 8TB SSD drives that Azure has, which makes the most sense to use multiple 1TB SSDs or the 8TB SSD drives? Well that depends. The 8TB SSDs give you 7500 IOPs and 250 MB/sec, but if I take 8...
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Being critical without being a crank
Tweets, facebook posts and blog posts can be powerfull things. The have the ability to sway peoples opinions of others, to drive people to buy software, to sell stock, and to make bad...
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Should I be blocking outbound ports in Azure by default?
The short answer is that yes there are ports that you’ll want to block outbound by default. There’s a variety of amplification attacks that you have the possibility of being a member of. These attacks...
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Be sure to thank the sponsors
Conferences, no matter the size all have one thing in common, they all require the same thing to run from Breakfast until Dinner for the day (or multiple days) that the event runs. That thing they need...
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JSON documents in Azure and IF/THEN blocks
If you do any work in Azure you’ve probably done deployments using JSON scripts. Originally JSON in Azure didn’t support much, you could create objects, but if you put it in the JSON script, it would...
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Exchanging SQL Certificates with different service accounts can be tricky
Setting up Transparent Data Encryption, or Backup Encryption, or basically anything else where you need to restore a certificate to another SQL Server instance can get tricky as soon as you run the...
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General availability: SQL Database auto-failover groups – and it looks awesome
A really great feature in Azure SQL DB went GA today. That feature gives you and SQL DB the ability to automatically fail databases over to a Secondary replia, without having to configure your...
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