Excellence in SQL Server

I just upgraded SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to 17.6 and the I noticed that I didn't have the latest preview of SQL Operations...

I am a big fan of using Ola Hallengren's backup and maintenance solution. https://ola.hallengren.com/ But there may be times that you...

In some circumstances you may need to create multiple listeners for an availability group. It may be that you require each application to...

SQL Server has supported SSL for a number of years and you can enable SSL encryption for your Availability Group listeners to encrypt...

Whilst working on a job, I found a number of servers that had very large error logs because of an error like this. The activated proc...

Most people know that SQL Server is installed on TCP port 1433 by default. This usually gets changed as it is a well known security...

Previously I have posted about the importance of SQL Server Agent jobs being owned by sa and the problems that can be caused by jobs...

msdb is a system database used mainly by the SQL Server Agent to store system activities like SQL Server jobs, mail, service broker,...

I often see SQL Server Agent jobs owned by user accounts. These could be SQL logins or Windows accounts. I like to have all jobs owned by...

When doing system health checks I still see a number of systems that are not using Instant File Initialization (IFI). This feature of SQL...

I went to this event earlier this week, just to keep abreast of what is happening with SQL Server 2017. The event had quite a small...

Previously I had tried to get a Docker Windows container running SQL Server 2017 with no success. So when I saw that Microsoft had a new...

Most DBA's are familiar with the index option of fill factor. It tells the Database Engine how full it should make the leaf level of...

Every DBA should have a toolkit. A set of scripts that you are comfortable with and can reuse over and over again. If you don't, then...

Not many people use the templates available in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and I was one of those people until recently when I...

In a previous post I mentioned heap tables and since then I decided that they deserve their own post. Heaps tables can be: - tables...

In a recent blog on database corruption I mentioned that I had dropped all the statistical indexes and let the optimizer recreate them as...

Is your highest wait statistic type CXPacket? The simplest explanation of this wait type is that there are parallel plans running. For...

There have been many times when I have reviewed SQL Server installations and found databases in a backward compatibility level. Backward...

Now that we understand better about Primary Keys, Foreign Keys and declarative referential integrity (DRI). We can look at how this is...