Category: Administration
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SQL Data Warehouse – Fast row counts
A couple of years ago I published a script to calculate fast, light-weight, row counts for SQL Server on-premises. The need to view the row counts of tables has not diminished but new technologies have come to the fore-front. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture designed for large-scale data warehouses. […]
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5 Extended Events Sessions Your SQL Server Instance Cannot Live Without
SQL Server Extend Events is a general event-handling system. It correlates data from SQL Server and, to a limited degree, the operating system. Extended Events are an optimized replacement for SQL Trace. In most cases, Extended Events are much lighter weight and they are always the preferred method for trace events. In addition, there are […]
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Inside the XEvent Profiler
XEvent Profiler is a new feature of SQL Server Management Studio v17.3. I applaud the SQL Server Tools Team for this feature. I feel like it will go a long way towards putting the legacy SQL Profiler to bed. Sometimes you cannot do any better than taking it straight from the source. Here is Microsoft’s […]
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Synchronizing SQL Server Instance Objects in an Availability Group
Availability groups can no longer be considered new. The feature was released in SQL Server 2012 but I often notice that SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) are much better understood. For a very long time, when people thought about SQL Server they thought about the entire instance as a unit. Microsoft has been implementing […]
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Redgate SQL Prompt Grid Features
I love Redgate tools. Most of all, I love SQL Prompt because its features increase my productivity on a daily basis. Recently I discovered a couple of new features for the SQL Server Management Studio results grid. The usefulness of these features is incredible. Script to Insert By selecting rows from the results grid, you […]
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DBCC CLONEDATABASE
Often I hear developers claim that they need production data in order to properly tune their queries. There are a couple of reasons that they believe this. The most important one is likely because the execution plans generated in a development environment with limited data will be different than the ones which are generated with […]
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Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools
Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools are a mechanism for grouping your Azure SQL Databases together into a shared resource pool. Imagine for a moment that you had a physical server on premise. On that server, you have a single SQL Server instance and a single database. This example is similar to how Azure SQL Database […]
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Connecting your Azure regions
In this post, I am going to demonstrate how to configure virtual network gateways in Azure using Resource Manager. This is important for connecting two Azure regions together, enabling you to setup high-availability and/or disaster recovery systems. 1. Resource Groups Begin by creating or selecting a resource group in each of the regions that you […]
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T-SQL Tuesday #85: STOP! Restore Time!
I know, I know. That was a bit much. This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Kenneth Fisher (b | t). T-SQL Tuesday (#TSQL2sDAY) is a blog party founded by Adam Machanic (b | t). Each month a member of the community hosts the party and selects a topic for us to write about. […]
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SQL Agent 2016 Jobs Running PowerShell Scripts
I recently performed a side-by-side upgrade of a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance to SQL Server 2016 RTM. This particular instance had over 200 SQL Agent jobs running various PowerShell scripts. After the upgrade I had to modify nearly all of those PowerShell scripts because of a bug with the PowerShell SQLSERVER provider that is […]