When reviewing our execution plans we’ll see joins executed using different operators. The type of operator is chosen based on the data that’s available to join and how the optimiser wants to execute it. In this post we’ll take a look at what the operators are, when they are used, and how they work. These […]
When restoring a database in different environments we may stumble across orphan users. This typically manifests through failed connections to the database. Here we’ll have a quick look at what the issue is and 3 ways to fix it. What are orphaned users When users are created in a database they’re mapped to the login […]
A few weeks ago I demonstrated the simplicity of performing point-in-time database restored in Azure Managed Instance. Whilst that has a lovely front-end, it can be just as easy with a proc call on your traditional SQL instance. Let’s see how to use two open source tools to achieve this simplicity. Back it up Before we […]
SQL Agent jobs allow us to schedule and automate tasks on a SQL Server instance. Crucially, when things go wrong we need to know about them. That’s why we use notifications. Setting up Operators and job Notifications is as expected on a Managed Instance. However, when it comes to sending the notifications we may have […]
We may associate consuming data from Azure Storage with tools like Data Factory or even SSIS as we saw recently. We don’t always need the middle man though. Here we’ll demonstrate how to use an External Data Source to perform the ingestion directly into SQL Server. Firstly we need the credential to authenticate against the storage. […]
One method for transferring a database to a different environment is using a Data-Tier Application – in the form of a DACPAC (for schema) or BACPAC (for schema and data). Trying to use this approach with multi-database solutions is a challenge though as Data-Tier Applications don’t play nicely with cross-database objects. Let’s look at how we can […]
We have database roles for reading and writing data but interestingly there’s no role which provides permission to execute procedures. Most DBAs I’ve worked with – production or development – prefer to use stored procedures for data access rather than an ORM. A role to allow procedure execution would be very handy. So let’s fix […]
Last week we looked at using Database Snapshots to help with rolling back upgrades. The snapshot maintained a point in time copy of the database which could be later restored. We can go further – a database can have multiple snapshots. Let’s suppose we want to take one before an upgrade, another once the upgrade is […]
Deploying database changes are relatively easy. Where things get complicated is the rollback. Sure, it’s easy to script out and revert a procedure to a previous version, but what about destructive changes? In this post we’ll look at how we can use Database Snapshots to remove some of the headache that comes with rolling back […]
Recently we looked at single threaded concurrency in SQL Server for workloads which only need a single core to execute. We saw how they ran at the same time with the queries effectively being round-robined on the CPU. This time out I wanted to look at how the concurrency looks when we’re working with multithreaded workloads. Setting […]
Andy Brownsword 