SQL Server Diaries

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]

I recently came across a number of SSISDB databases (on SQL Server 2012 instances) configured with the default log retention settings. While this might not seem like a problem, on a system hosting a considerable number of packages, where some of said packages are scheduled to run multiple times a... [Read More]