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 […]
Author: jdanton1
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 […]
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 […]