Category: SQL Server
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Low Impact Maintenance for Multi-Terabyte Data Estates
Core responsibility of a DBA is to make sure that the databases they are responsible for are maintained properly. In a nutshell this usually means that you are taking backups of the data, checking the consistency of the databases and maintaining statistics and indexes. Performing these tasks gives the DBA…
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SQL Server 2019 security improvements: Feature Restrictions
Very recently I was working on a customer databases, when I more or less stumbled on a something I had not noticed before. Apparently at some point the latest version of SQL Server (I was working with Azure SQL DB) had a new security enhancement added into it called Feature…
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Platform-as-a-Service databases and the future of the DBA role
I just realized that it has been awhile since my last post, so I figured it’s time to do one before the end of the year. Last few months have been rather hectic with me migrating new workloads to Cloud as well as taking the time to visit PASS Summit…
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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 4: Managed Backups
You’re now reading the 4th and final post in my SQL Server Backups to Azure series. In previous posts I’ve described how to set up an Azure Storage Account, Blob Storage container and how to take SQL Server backups there. This time we’ll take a look at one more option…
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SQL Server Backups to Azure Part 3: Custom Backups
You are now reading the 3rd part of the 4 part series on backing up databases to Azure. In Part 1 we looked at some benefits of using Azure for your backups and in Part 2 we set up the Storage Account with the Block Blob storage container. In this…
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Moving data (back and forth) with backups
Backups, backups, and backups. That’s pretty much my answer to what should be the top 3 priority topics that any DBA needs to understand well. And that’s what we’re going to be looking at this post, backups! Backups play a vital and important role in keeping your data (and in…
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Fun with Filegroups
Filegroups are an interesting and useful (if not actually all that fun, despite the title) concept within SQL Server. They provide not just a way to group objects like tables together, but also provide a mechanism to help us to speed up the backup, restore, and recovery of the databases.…
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Hiding (mostly) in plain sight: Dynamic Data Masking
One of the more recent additions to SQL Server security features is the Dynamic Data Masking (DDM), included with the 2016 version. Like the Transparent Data Encryption I blogged about recently, DDM is a feature that is relatively easy to implement, and doesn’t require a lot of changes to the…
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Protecting Data at Rest: Transparent Data Encryption
I recently read an article which stating that since the GDPR came in force, there has been 59,000 data breaches reported in the EU. I must admit, that while I did anticipate that we’d see a surge in these numbers, due to reporting requirements in the legislation. I really did…
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My favorite PerfMon counters
About two months back I ended up moving to another job, which has unfortunately kept me to be bit too occupied to find the time to blog, until now. Due to this previously mentioned career change, I have been working quite a bit with monitoring, and it gave me a…