SQL Server Diaries

A couple of weeks ago, a domestic appliances purchased recently started flashing a light on the display panel, indicating that something was wrong. I checked the manual that came with it, followed the troubleshooting steps, yet the issue persisted. So I called the Customer Care number and, after a couple... [Read More]

Availability Groups (AGs) on Enterprise Edition can be used to group databases and have them failover together to Secondary nodes for example - the key words here are “Enterprise Edition” and “together”. [Read More]

The idea of a SQL Firewall came to me a number of years ago, probably sometime around 2008, however I have not given it much thought since. It has come up a number of times in discussions with colleagues, managers, and clients however the discussions did not move further. [Read More]

During the course of our development (yes, DBAs do develop code) we use and sometimes write our own tools, scripts, and so forth. Some I use regularly to format code for readability (such as PoorSQL), and others not that often. One of the latter is a SQL linter. [Read More]

SQL Server has allowed storage of binary data in the database at least since SQL Server 2000. With the release of SQL Server 2005, the IMAGE data type was subsequently planned for deprecation and replaced by VARBINARY(max). The IMAGE data type still works and is still supported in SQL Server... [Read More]