SQL Server Premier Field Engineer Blog
This is a shared team blog of the SQL Server Premier Field Engineer team
Physical_Device_Name Not Updated On Restore
The Problem You restored a database on top of an existing database to refresh your development...
Date: 02/25/2019
Automate Azure VM Storage
The Problem One of the best things about Azure, and the cloud in general, is we can automate most...
Date: 02/25/2019
FileStream Backup and Restore
I have been asked to provide some information on best practice for SQL Server Backup and Restore...
Date: 10/05/2018
AlwaysOn Availability Groups unable to query against readable secondary replica database: Wait Type HADR_DATABASE_WAIT_FOR_TRANSITION_TO_VERSIONING
Recently a customer reported an interesting issue, while querying against recently added readable...
Date: 07/13/2018
Configure SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance on Azure Virtual Machines with MSDTC
Configure SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance If you are running a SQL Server Failover Cluster...
Date: 07/05/2018
Domain Independent Cluster and Availability Group
What is a Domain Independent Cluster? Did you know that you can have a Windows cluster that is a...
Date: 07/05/2018
Read-Scale Availability Group Setup
What is a Read-Scale Availability Group? A Read-Scale Availability Group is a Clusterless...
Date: 07/05/2018
MSDTC Supported Configurations
The MSDTC Configuration Conundrum MSDTC configuration is not as straight forward as you might think....
Date: 07/05/2018
Migrating Symmetric Keys Between SQL 2016 and SQL 2017/Azure
There has been a recent discussion about migrating symmetric keys between instances and version of...
Date: 06/08/2018
Monitoring Azure Analysis Services with Log Analytics and Power BI
How do you monitor Azure Analysis Services? How many users are connected and who are they? These are...
Date: 04/02/2018
How to Upgrade an AG Cluster to Windows 2016
Starting in Windows Server 2012 R2 you now have a way to upgrade a cluster to Windows 2016. The...
Date: 12/08/2017
SQL Server 2017 Read-Scale Availability Groups
SQL Server 2017 was recently launched, having multiple new features. One of these included something...
Date: 11/17/2017
Implementing Buffer Pool Extension
Buffer Pool Extension was released in SQL 2014 so it's not new. It is also not advertised very...
Date: 10/19/2017
Microsoft Excel, TLS & SQL Server – Important Considerations
Background As you may know, TLS 1.0 is being deprecated due to various known exploits and will no...
Date: 09/27/2017
Sync SQL Logins and Jobs
In this post I'll point you to some options to sync SQL logins and then I'll demo my favorite option...
Date: 08/21/2017
Trace Flag 1117 Growth and Contention
In this video I talk about Trace Flag 1117 and how it was designed to help keep data file growth...
Date: 07/18/2017
Query Store Questions From The Field
I have had several Query Store questions come in from customers lately. Some of the questions...
Date: 07/17/2017
SQL Server Workgroup Cluster FCM Errors
Background One of the new features of SQL Server 2016 is the ability to use SQL Server with Failover...
Date: 06/28/2017
SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - Triggers and Historical Data Tidbits
Hello again and welcome back to the series on Temporal Tables! Today we will take a look at two...
Date: 06/20/2017
Troubleshooting CDC enabling failure – Part 2
In previous blog, I discussed the CDC failure due to guest user disabled in MSDB. My customer also...
Date: 05/30/2017
Troubleshooting CDC enabling failure – Part 1
My customer had recently experienced 2 interesting CDC issues and I would like to share the...
Date: 05/17/2017
Login Failed for xxx – Who’s Keeps Trying to Connect to my Server?
I recently ran into an issue in which a machine was connecting to SQL and continuously generating a...
Date: 05/04/2017
SSISDB Reporting with Power BI
Back in 2012 when the project deployment model came out for SSIS, many questions were asked...
Date: 04/18/2017
Quick Tip - Shift+Alt for multiple line edits
We've all been in the position where we are doing research and need to add commas or single quotes...
Date: 04/11/2017
SSIS: Capturing PerfMon Counters During Package Execution
While troubleshooting SSIS package performance, having the ability to view the performance monitor...
Date: 03/15/2017
Split a file group into multiple data files
Periodically we are asked how to split an existing filegroup into multiple data files. The quick...
Date: 03/03/2017
SQL Diagnostics Project Part 2 – Custom SQL Nexus Imports
Several years ago, I wrote a blog post as to how you can collect your own custom SQL data from a...
Date: 02/24/2017
Trouble shooting Availability Group Listener in Azure SQL VM
Last week, I have had one mystery challenge while creating Availability Group listener in Azure. We...
Date: 02/21/2017
SSIS: Setting the same variable in multiple projects in the catalog
Recently I was assisting a customer with a review of their SSIS implementation and one the security...
Date: 02/14/2017
Increasing the Number of SQL Server Error Logs – My Automation Journey – Part 2
In my last post, I discussed how to increase the error logs through the GUI and explained the back...
Date: 02/09/2017
Azure RM: Configure a second Availability Group with a Listener using the External Load Balancer
In a previous post, we have reviewed Azure RM: How to create SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups...
Date: 01/31/2017
APS Blocked Partition Switch
In SQL Server, when you perform a partition switch, a schema lock is acquired briefly to do the...
Date: 01/30/2017
The EXECUTE permission was denied on xp_msver
Recently after installing SQL Server and configuring SSIS for project deployment in a SQL Server...
Date: 01/24/2017
SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - How do you drop a Temporal Table?
As we continue our journey with Temporal Tables, the next topic will be how do you drop them. While...
Date: 01/19/2017
Incremental Statistics – My New Favorite Thing
So many new features get added with each release of SQL it is hard to use them all. Sometimes, I...
Date: 01/17/2017
APS 2016 External Object Changes
APS customers who use Polybase and will be soon upgrading to APS 2016 from AU5 or prior should...
Date: 01/11/2017
CREATE INDEX Monitoring Progress
One of the challenges for DBA's are to work on heavy load and critical systems where maintenance...
Date: 12/22/2016
SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - Can you change the schema?
I was recently asked if after you setup a Temporal Table, can you modify the schema? It was a great...
Date: 12/21/2016
Recover database without LDF file
I recently came across a missing LDF file case that I would like to share some interesting findings....
Date: 11/16/2016
Tempdb misconfiguration when SQL Server fails to create a secondary data file
One of the tempdb best practices when you configure SQL Server is to create additional data files...
Date: 11/10/2016
Troubleshooting intermittent connection timeout
In this blog, we are going to take a deep dive into a connectivity issue my customer encountered a...
Date: 11/08/2016
SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - What are they and how do you set one up?
What are Temporal Tables? This is the start of a series of posts about one of my favorite new...
Date: 11/01/2016
Increasing the Number of SQL Server Error Logs – My Automation Journey – Part 1
I recently ran into an issue (will describe it in a follow-up post) in which I needed to review SQL...
Date: 10/28/2016
Performing transaction log backups using AlwaysOn Availability Group read-only secondary replicas-Part2
Describe the log backup process on a ROSR This is the second post in a planned series of articles...
Date: 10/19/2016
Performing Transaction Log Backups using AlwaysOn Availability Group Read-Only Secondary Replicas - Part 1
This is the first post in a planned series of articles relating to SQL Server Transaction Log...
Date: 10/19/2016
Finding Which Connections Have Been Read Only Routed
This is a follow up to my first post Finding What Availability Group Listeners Applications Are...
Date: 10/18/2016
Create a Quick and Easy Performance Baseline
In this blog post I am going to discuss a very little-known performance metric introduced in SQL...
Date: 10/11/2016
TCP Port Is Already In Use
It's 3 AM on a Saturday morning and you receive that dreaded phone call – "The SQL Server just had...
Date: 10/05/2016
SSIS version number is not valid error
In a previous blog post, I showed you how you can set a target server version for an SSIS project in...
Date: 09/29/2016
SQL 2016 Backup Compression with TDE Enabled Databases
The Background Before SQL Server 2016, businesses had to choose between securing their databases...
Date: 09/27/2016