First things first–if you are reading this, and not regularly running consistency checks on your SQL Server databases, you should drop everything you are doing and go do that. What do I mean by regularly? In my opinion, based on years of experience, you should run DBCC CHECKDB at least as frequently as you take […]
Author: jdanton1
Getting Started with Log Replay Service for Azure SQL Managed Instance
Recently, I’ve started on a project where we are migrating a customer to Azure SQL Managed Instance, which now supports a few different migration paths. You can simply backup and restore from a database backup, but you can’t apply a log or differential backup to that database. You can also use the Database Migration Service, […]
A Post-mortem for PASS, and What That NDA* Issue Was
Editor’s Note: I wrote this last December, and went back and forth on publishing. As I see some of the poor leadership patterns from PASS, creeping into new offshoots of the SQL Community, I decided to publish it today. I am not writing this to dance on the grave of PASS or throw pitchforks at […]
Passing the AZ-500 Exam–How I Prepared
A few months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on security for Microsoft Teams. In preparing for that webcast, I noticed a number of security features that required either Azure Active Directory P2, or Office 365 M5. In order to get either of those two features for free, DCAC needed to gain the […]
A Lesson in DR, Azure Site Recovery, and Troubleshooting
I need to blog more. Stupid being busy. Anyway, last week, we were doing a small scale test for a customer, and it didn’t work the way we were expecting, and for one of the dumbest reasons I’ve ever seen. If you aren’t familiar with Azure Site Recovery it provides disk level replication for VMs, […]
Senior SQL Server DBA Job Interview Questions–2021
In my role as a consultant, it’s rare that I go on an interview anymore, though I occasionally get interviewed by a client, or interview potential DBAs for clients as part of my role. There are a number of these lists on the internet, but many of them are old and focus on trivia questions […]
Validating IP Addresses in PowerShell
I had a client ask me to write a PowerShell script (for an Azure Automation runbook) to automate the creation of firewall rules for an Azure SQL Database. As part of this process, I was planning on having to validate the IP addresses (a valid IP address is of the format x.x.x.x where x is […]
How Do You Shrink Your Azure SQL Database?
In the early days of Azure SQL Database (ne SQL Azure) we had size limits that were minuscule–I vaguely remember 5 and 10 GB, but it could have been smaller. Back then space was at a premium. In 2021, we have hyperscale that allows us to have an Azure SQL Database of up to 100 […]
Do You Even Tag, Bro?
Sorry for the clickbaity title. One of the things I hated most about working in corporate IT, was the persistent, never ending discussions around server naming standards. I once flew to Switzerland to spend 16 hours in a room full of dudes (it’s always a room full of dudes) discussing each of the 16 characters […]
Dear Microsoft—Help Us Help You
One of the things that is so “fun” about working with Microsoft Azure, is the near constant rate of change in the platform. I did put fun in quotation marks, but I really mean it—if I had to work on the same things every day my job would become quite boring. Part of this constant […]