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20 articles from the notebook.
The Incident Recently I received word that one of our Azure Data Factory pipelines was experiencing significant latency. At the heart of this pipeline is an Azure SQL Managed Instance that is used as a staging tier. I…
Read articleThe Problem We recently migrated the underlying “ReportServer” and “ReportServerTempDB” databases of our SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) environment to a newer instance. Everything worked fine and there were no…
Read articleBackground Everyone knows that it’s a good idea to regularly run integrity checks on your databases (you are doing that right?). What may be less obvious is that it’s generally recommended with AlwaysOn Availability…
Read articleThe Problem I encountered an issue lately where one particular service account kept losing access on a development instance. Since the login and user were present I went to one of the usual culprits, orphaned users. I…
Read articleIn This Article TLDR Macs are a pleasant place to spend 40+ hours in your work week, and totally workable for those with Microsoft-centric jobs. Let me give you a jump start on how to make it work. The Background I’m…
Read articleThe Problem One of the initiatives I’ve been working toward with my team this year is automating as much of our SQL Server patching as possible. Over time our environment has become increasingly complex, and while…
Read articleBackground My colleague and I were recently looking for ways to improve our production Availabiity Group nodes. These are beefy machines with a large amount of memory, and things like buffer cache scans can be lengthy.…
Read articleI’ll never forget when I first started working with SQL Server. After the initial excitement of diving into something new I launched SSMS and then just sat there looking at a blank query window, with no idea what to do…
Read articleTLDR : If you have the SQL Browser Service disabled then you must also have Shared Memory enabled, otherwise SQL Server can’t communicate with itself. While setting up a sandbox Always On Availability Group cluster…
Read article(Update: I’ve since discovered that SqlServerDsc has replaced xSQLServer.) One of my growing passions is using PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to automate all the things. I started out with simple…
Read articleMy apologies for the significant gap between my last post on our CRM 2016 Upgrade Adventure and this one. My time has been consumed with preparing for go-live, but I’ve been keeping track of the roadblocks and caveats…
Read articleAs I mentioned in the last post, I’m taking you through our adventure in upgrading the existing on-premise Dynamics CRM 2011 environment to 2016 (and eventually 2016 cloud). Previously I discussed the first show-stopper…
Read articleThis post is the first in a new series I’m going to call “CRM 2016 Upgrade Adventure”. Summary: my organization has taken on the ambitious challenge of not only upgrading our existing Dynamics CRM 2011 environment to…
Read articleA project I’ve been wanting to work on for a long time is how to automate restores of our Production databases to the Test instance. There are a number of challenges associated with this. First, the restore has to be…
Read articleIn the past we’ve explored how to use PowerShell to automate failovers on SQL Failover Clusters for Windows Updates and other scheduled maintenance. But what if you’re using Availability Groups instead of the…
Read articleIn SQL Server, a login is an instance level object that is used for authentication. It is mapped to a database user, which controls permissions at the database level. These objects (login and user) are tied to one…
Read articleIt’s an odd truth that laziness leads to better systems administration. That is, so long as it spurs you to automate and thoroughly document a repetitive or tedious task. For instance, I was recently tasked with…
Read articleAs much as we’d all like to set up our SQL instances and never again let anyone touch them, that’s just not possible in real life. We live in a world where entities, for good or for evil, are constantly exposing…
Read articleAs you probably know, there is a server configuration option called “optimize for ad hoc workloads”. For more details on that option check out the MSDN article . The real question is, how do I know the extent to which…
Read articleSo, here’s the deal. You’ve got Change Data Capture going in your environment and want to move your database to an Availability Group on SQL Server 2012. That’s great, lots of advantages there. But what happens to CDC…
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