Category: Windows Administration
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Nevergreen SQL Server deployments and mitigating patching pains
Not too long ago, Microsoft released The Final Service Pack for any version of SQL Server, as a part of their move to a Modern Servicing Model. This (and the fall time here in Finland) got me again thinking about the benefits of running your database workloads on PaaS over self-managed VMs. And one of…
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School of Hard Knocks: SQL Server, Storage Spaces Direct and Cluster Shared Volumes edition
While I work 100% with cloud based SQL Server deployments these days, my life is not all unicorns and PaaS services. Surprisingly (or not) enough, many of the environments in the cloud are still build on top of good, trusty virtual machines. Except that sometimes they’re not good or trusty. There are definitely some good…
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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 spark to write this post…
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Managing shared folders in Windows Failover Cluster with Powershell
I’ve been using Powershell more and more lately, most of the time the motivation has been to do repeatable tasks much more quickly and efficiently but there has also been other cases where Powershell has been the only way to accomplish something. Most often this is due to lacking GUI or Windows issues that have prevented me from…
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Poor results in I/O tests due to Windows Task Scheduler settings
Not a long ago I was doing a database cluster delivery to one of our customers and as a part of that process, I scheduled our regular set of test runs for the storage. The results of the tests we ran were bad and none of the changes we did at the SAN weren’t helping.…
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Windows Firewall and antivirus software configurations for SQL Server.
One of the more important duties of a DBA is to make sure that their databases and the data is secure. In this post we’ll be looking at two utilities to increase the security of your server, the Windows Firewall and an antivirus software. Like with about everything else related to servers, you can’t just…
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End of Lifecycle for Windows 2003 R2 and SQL Server 2005
Just a friendly reminder to everyone that just like all good things come to and end so does the extended support for these two Microsoft products. First will be the Windows 2003 R2 with the end of lifecycle date set to July 14 2015 and soon after that SQL Server 2005 with it’s end of…