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I lot of you have asked me to expand on the automated SQL Server installation I mentioned in my previous article: dbatools is a free PowerShell module with over 500 SQL Server best practice, administration, development and migration commands included https://dbatools.io/ The dbatools team have spent long hours making sure
DML Triggers are commonly used to apply some business rules to the data in the table. The most common implementation would be updating the date_updated column automatically whenever the data in the table changes. For the illustration, this can be done with a following trigger: However, there are times where
Being able to run virtual machines on our local computers, whether for testing or development is very convenient and almost natural. Hyper-V is part of Windows and is an obvious choice for many. The main advantage is that it’s free. And that’s about it. This post is based on recent
As a DBA, developer, and more importantly the creator of SQLWATCH.IO, I need the ability to rapidly deploy and test different SQL Server configurations or test different upgrade variations from one version of SQLWATCH to another. This is quite laborious, time-consuming tasks as I either have to build a new SQL
In my previous post, I described different ways to read very large SQL Server Log (ERRORLOG) – 5GB to be exact. However, this was a reaction to something that has already happened. In this post, I will show you how to prevent this from happening at all.
When dealing with large logs I often find it difficult to find the information we are looking for. To make it easier, we can use PowerShell to add colours the ERRORLOG based on string patterns Note this will only work when using the Select-String command. Remote ISE Even though we need physical
What is ransomware Ransomware is a type of malicious software that locks access to user files until a ransom is paid. Quite common “locking mechanism” is by encrypting all files on a user computer, server or even the entire network. Encryption is a process of scrambling original data using an
Let’s take a look at different ways of reading the SQL Server ERRORLOG….I often come across large ERRORLOGS mainly because they are not being recycled frequent enough, or not at all. Sometimes, despite the frequent recycling, the ERRORLOG can grow to unmanageable size. This has recently happened to me during a large transaction rollback over Synchronous Availability Group. Within a few hours, the ERRORLOG log grew to 5GB in size due to “Sending page request for Undo” messages.
A lot of database administrators and developers like to use the SQL Server Management Studio to make changes to the database schema directly. As a production DBA, I can definitely say that there are situations where this is acceptable and even desired, however, in most cases a Visual Studio Database Project is a much better approach. I have made a switch from developing in SSMS to Visual Studio several years ago and never looked back.
An important element of performance monitoring is knowing what SQL agent jobs run at what time to understand and avoid potential clashing. Notice the underlined what time – time correlation is very important when it comes to performance but finding it is not always easy. I wrote a simple PowerShell script to help visualise what jobs run and when