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T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party for the SQL Server community (or Microsoft Data Platform community. Although it’s called T-SQL Tuesday, it’s not limited to SQL Server database engine only). It is the brainchild of Adam Machanic blog | twitter. This month’s tsql2sday is being hosted by Koen Verbeeck blog |twitter and the topic is “The times they are a changing”. Basically, how are you handling the ever changing landscape of the SQL DBA. [Read More]

If you are a SQL Server professional and are interested in spending a day with a bunch of other like-minded individuals, SQL Saturday is for you. It’s a day chock full of SQL Server related presentations given by other members of the community. Here is a glimpse of my presentation on SQL Server Automation using PowerShell taken from the SQL Saturday event page. If PowerShell isn’t your thing that’s OK. There are plenty of other topics to choose from. [Read More]

Another great teaching opportunity landed in my lap this week. I got an email from a coworker looking for some help troubleshooting a SQL connection issue. He had an application server that could not connect to one of our SQL Servers. We have a fairly complex and secure network environment. Multiple networks across multiple data centers with multiple firewalls in between. Because of this, one of the first things I typically look at is connectivity between application and database servers. [Read More]

Just wanted to put a quick post out there for the people who follow me. I very recently made a switch from Wordpress to Jekyll blogging platform and I am certain it will come with a few hiccups. At the moment I don’t have comments enabled, although I hope to add that feature this weekend. Also I do need to go through all of my posts and make sure images and code snippets all look how they’re supposed to. [Read More]

This is something that has caused me some grief in my life as a DBA. I hesitate to call it a bug, but this little gottcha resurfaced in a change that was submitted by a teammate just today. So I wanted to share while it was fresh in my mind. When you script out a SQL Agent Job you’ll notice that the job schedule will have a schedule_uid parameter (providing your job has a schedule). [Read More]

Summit 2013 in Charlotte, NC was my first and I remember it well. I went with 4 other people from my company but I was pretty new to the SQL PASS community (otherwise known as #sqlfamily). As a matter of fact I didn’t even know what #sqlfamily was at this point. I went to all of the PASS sponsored events like the welcome reception, the vendor party and yes the NASCAR party (which being a NASCAR fan was awesome). [Read More]

I think the title is fairly descriptive so let me put a little context around it for you. In my SQL Server environment we backup our databases to local disk. Unfortunately we don’t have unlimited storage for backups, which means we have to delete the old backups on a regular basis. A very typical practice in the SQL DBA world. I was writing a new cmdlet for dbatools.io (Remove-DbaBackup to be released in October) and needed to decide how I wanted users to provide the retention for their SQL backups. [Read More]

Availability groups have owners, just like every other object in SQL Server. The owner sid is found in sys.availability_replicas. The script below will map those sids to an actual principal name, and display the owners for all AG’s on the replica where you run it. You can run this on both the PRIMARY and SECONDARY replicas, which we have discovered may or may not be consistent. Regardless, you should see an owner for every AG on your SQL Server. [Read More]