Why should you patch your SQL Server instances? Compliance, stability, security, reliability, functionality, and more. Microsoft regularly releases updates to SQL Server known as Cumulative Updates (CUs). Cumulative updates often contain security updates that address vulnerabilities in additional to performance and reliability improvements to SQL Server. There are also bug fixes that are often included […]
Why You Should Test Your SQL Server Backups
My number one reason that you should test your backups is to make sure you know how to restore/recover. The absolute worst time to learn how to restore is when a restore is needed. By regularly testing your backups, you build up muscle memory in how to recover. By regularly validating your restore solution, you’ll […]
Why Aren’t You Monitoring SQL Server
I repeat the phrase “If you aren’t monitoring it, you can’t measure it” all the time. Through my IT career, this has been a constant. If you don’t have a baseline or know what normal looks like, then how can you quantify what isn’t normal when a user starts complaining of performance issues. For SQL […]
Stop Using Balanced Power with SQL Server
The OS default Power Plan for Windows is Balanced Power. This can cause degraded overall performance for SQL Server. Balanced Power is a great concept to help conserve energy by scaling the processor performance based on current CPU utilization, however it isn’t conducive to SQL Server workloads. For SQL Server, I always ask organizations to […]
Reasons Why SQL Servers Don’t Get Configured to Industry Best Practices
Throughout my career, I’ve worked on a LOT of different SQL Servers. Many that were installed and configured by application administrators, developers, vendors, and data professionals. I’ve seen servers with straight defaults and others with various industry accepted best practices applied. One of my favorite sessions I present is “Common SQL Server Mistakes and How […]
Children at Technical Conferences Part II
Nearly 10 years ago I wrote a blog post about having my son tag along at various conferences I was speaking at. So much has changed in the past ten years and thankfully I’ve been able to bring my entire family along on various other trips. I was reminded by a Facebook memory about a […]
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Error
I came across an issue with SSMS not loading properly recently. Regardless of launching from the start menu with or without administrator, SSMS would error out. Due to this error, I also could not uninstall SSMS to try a repair. After much trial and error and Google/Bing searches I was able to correct the issue […]
SQL Server 2022 is Here!
SQL Server 2022 becoming generally available was announced on Nov 16th 2022. This is the most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet, which is pretty exciting. A major Azure-enabled feature is the ability to leverage Azure SQL Managed Instance for disaster recovery, which also means we can backup and restore from Azure SQL Managed Instance […]