The Hammer

Do not use percentage based auto-growth

Having autogrowth enabled on your SQL Server instance is great! Even in IT shops where you diligently right-size your database files (which is a good idea), autogrowth is the perfect emergency feature. It will increase the size of your files, as needed, until…

Fast, light-weight, row counts

Often we need to know the number of records in a table. If you are looking for something very specific, such as the number of non-NULL values in a particular column, learn how to use COUNT() correctly with this post…

Synchronizing Server Objects for Availability Groups

Updated: 9/8/2017 In addition to the release based method demonstrated below. I created a SQL Agent job based method using dbatools here. This method was created in response to a lot of feedback from DBAs like you. Original After we…

It is who you know, or is it?

I have spent a lot of time learning about how to effectively network and the benefits that it can bring to my life and career. What I find interesting, however, is that there is a negative connotation revolving around the good ol’…

Writing Repeatable T-SQL

Writing code for a database is more of a challenge than writing for applications. Before the developers bite my head off, I do not mean that the languages, such as T-SQL, are more difficult or that applications are any less…

SQL Server SCHEMABINDING

SCHEMABINDING is an option that is available for objects in T-SQL which contain user defined code. Examples include, stored procedures, indexes, and functions. Straight from MSDN, SCHEMABINDING… Specifies that the schema is bound to the database objects that it references….

Row Level Security in SQL Server 2016 CTP2

Earlier this year Microsoft Azure implemented Row-Level Security (Brent’s announcement). In following Microsoft’s cloud-first release concept, this great feature is now part of SQL Server 2016 CTP2, and expected to be included in the RTM version. When I first saw…