Continuing with our recent theme of partitioning I wanted to make sure that we looked at one of my personal favourite features – Partition Switching. Partition Switching is the ability to switch an entire partition of data from one table to another almost instantly. Where it gets interesting is that this is the same operation […]
Last time out, following up to our posts looking at an introduction to partitioning and how to implement it we started to look at how to manage partitions. In this post we’ll continue that theme by looking at how we’d go about removing (or merging) partitions as well as covering some general considerations when we’re performing operations on partitions and […]
Last time out we tried our hand at implementing partitioning on a table with some data inside it. We looked at creating the partition function, followed by the partition scheme, and then applied that to our table and looked at the results. Following up on that I now wanted to look at how we can manage […]
A little while back we looked at an introduction to table partitioning where we covered the concepts involved in the partitioning. This time out we’ll look at how to implement those concepts to create a partitioned table. As we’re going through the motions for this let’s start off by creating a table and fill it with some […]
A few weeks back we looked at altering an object inside our database and changing the schema in which it resides. Whilst the ALTER SCHEMA … TRANSFER statement itself is straightforward, there are some gotchas you might find as a result of the change which I thought it was worth covering. To set up for what we’re going […]
Last time out we looked at referencing tables across databases. While we of course have the option of using three-part naming to address the table, we also considered views and synonyms as two alternative options. Both of these can be used to achieve similar results. There are elements which they have in common and others which […]
In SQL Server you can use partitioning to split a table into multiple segments based on the data contained within it. This feature can be used to bring improvements to performance and provide more flexibility with maintenance for those tables which are partitioned. The impact of these will be key for large data sets where […]
This post goes out to both the administrators and security folks out there who may be looking after encrypted databases. If you have schedules in place to maintain your certificates for any accounts, web sites, SFTP, etc. then you may want to add the certificates protecting your databases into the mix too. One element of […]
We’ve recently been looking at Transparent Database Encryption and how we go about implementing it an dealing with it in our environments. Now the question comes – what if we need to remove it? Well that’s why we’re here! Decrypting the database We’ll be approaching this in the reverse order to how we applied the […]
We’ve previously looked at how to implement transparent database encryption and then crucially how we can back up the certificate we’re using to apply the encryption. This time we’ll look at how we restore the certificate and a database backup which has been encrypted with Transparent Database Encryption (TDE). When we implement TDE on a […]
Andy Brownsword 