With the SQL Server 2016 release Microsoft has changed the way that they are delivering SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). In previous releases SSMS was installed as a part of the SQL Server installation itself from the SQL Server Installation Center. That is no longer the case with SQL Server 2016. Now SSMS is not […]
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One of Microsoft’s best practices for deploying SQL Server is to install it on Windows Server Core. Windows Server Core provides a more streamlined, efficient and secure platform than the full Windows Server implementation with the GUI. Even so few businesses have chosen to implement SQL Server on Server Core and there are a few […]
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Trace flag are switches in SQL Server, which would change the behavior of the SQL Engine. In developer terms they are like “if” clauses in the SQL Server code. If a trace flag is enabled, then certain behavior would change. One of the common trace flag which would be known to almost all DBAs and […]
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Microsoft has been investing a lot in Azure SQL Database. One of the feature which was introduced in Azure SQL Database was called as Query Store. This feature enables SQL Server to collect the query execution related data continuously in tables. Later, it can be used to see the historical data and solve few of […]
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Since the release of Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012,you now have the option of installing SQL Server databases on Windows Server SMB file Shares. You can do this for either standalone SQL Server installations or for clustered instances. In part 1, I provided an overview of the Windows Server SMB enhancements that made […]
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Working with SQL Server, one has to learn the terms of various configurations and have to understand how these configurations can be done. More important to those configuration mayhem is the need to understand what level of scope these configurations have effect. A typical example in one of the recent customer interaction, they were doing […]
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With the improvements in the Windows Server 2012 implementation it’s now feasible to install SQL Server on SMB network shares. This applies to both standalone SQL server installations as well as clustered SQL Server installation. Before that, it was possible with the use of trace flag 1807 but this was never a desired configuration. However, […]
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There’s no doubt that SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is the SQL Server DBA’s best friend and most frequently used tool. However, while everyone knows the basics of how to use SSMS to navigate through database objects as well as write and run queries there’s a lot of other functionality that’s built into SSMS that […]
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With the world moving to cloud, one of the major concerns for the SQL Server Database Administrators (DBAs) is performance of SQL Server running on virtual machine (VM) as compare to an on-premises machine. In case of on-premises machine, hardware is owned by company but on the other hand, in case of IaaS, the hardware, […]
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One of the primary requirements inside databases is the ability to scale the system as the data volumes and the number of users accessing the system increases appreciably. There are a number of ways in which this can be achieved. One of the touted and inbuilt capability that was introduced in SQL Server 2005 was […]
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In part 1, on Managing SQL Server with PowerShell, I covered some of the basics of getting started using PowerShell with SQL Server. In that article, you saw how to load the sqlps PowerShell Provider as well as how to use the provider to navigate through a SQL Server instance and execute queries against SQL […]
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When I was talking with a recent customer around how they can use some of the new capabilities that are getting introduced with SQL Server 2016, they suddenly got interested in evaluating the feature around Dynamic Data Masking. I showed some quick demo and this was getting some interesting use cases for their product which […]
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