I use a Mac (Intel, you can only run SQL Server on Edge on Apple chips) as my primary workstation. While I have a Windows VM locally, and several Azure VMs runnining Windows, I can do most of my demo, testing, and development SQL Server work locally using Azure Data Studio, sqlcmd, and SQL Server […]
Author: jdanton1
How to Remove a Data Disk from an Azure VM (How not to blow your leg off)
I was working with a client recently, were we had to reconfigure storage within a VM (which is always a messy proposition). In doing so, we were adding and removing disks from the VM. this all happened mostly during a downtime window, so it wasn’t a big deal to down a VM, which is how […]
Azure SQL Managed Instance versus Amazon RDS for SQL Server—Which Should You Choose? (Or why Managed Instance is faster)
Microsoft, in conjunction with Principle Technologies recently produced a benchmark, comparing the performance of Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Amazon RDS SQL Server. I normally really dislike these benchmarks—it can be really hard to build proper comparisons and the services frequently don’t have perfect equivalent service tiers, making them really hard to ultimately compare their […]
Taking Your Azure Active Directory Security to the Next Level
What if I told you just using multi-factor authentication (MFA) wasn’t enough anymore? The Lapsus$ hacking group, who were at least partially made up of a group of teenagers in the UK, took a very targeted hacking approach. They used password stuffing to try to breach the password credentials of power users within organizations they […]
Passing AZ-104–Azure Administrator
This Monday, I took and passed the Azure Administrator exam (Az-104) exam. It was a little bit unusual for me to take this exam, as I’m already an Azure Solutions Architect, but as part of the new Microsoft partner requirements, I had to take this exam, even though it’s a subset of what’s on the […]
PREEMPTIVE_OS_FILEOPS Waits and Filestream Restores
We had a case over the weekend where our automated restore process at client got hung up on this wait type, for a single database. What was the unique characteristic about this relatively medium (2-300 GB) database? It had a lot of filestream data–it seemed like the file count wasn’t that high, but my guess […]
Why You Shouldn’t Use Amazon RDS for your SQL Server Databases
Disclaimer: I’ve a Microsoft MVP and shareholder, but neither of these things affected my opinions in this post. Cloud vendors have built a rich array of platform as a service (PaaS) solutions on their platforms. They market these heavily, because they have higher degrees of stickyness compared to IaaS platforms (and in many cases they […]
Fixing SQL Server Database Corruption (when you get lucky)
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 […]
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 […]