I came across an interesting case today that I thought it was worth doing a quick blog post about. I was working with a customer who was migrating onto their newly built SQL Server 2014 clustered instance. Part of the pre-migration testing was to fail the SQL Server service between the two nodes to..
The ever expanding SQL Server family
SQL Server isn’t just the name of Microsoft’s relationship database engine, it’s also the name on the box that now contains over a dozen Microsoft data-centric products. Learning just how broad and deep this technology toolbox is should help stop us re-inventing the wheel - or worse, trying to make..
Are your database backups completing as quickly as they could?
Maintaining database backups is an essential part of most DBA's or Sys Admin's job descriptions, yet it's common to find deployments of larger databases where the time taken to run a full backup means that they are not being taken as regularly as possible. Using differential backups is all well and..
How in-memory ColumnStore Indexes change the way you have to size database servers
In-memory ColumnStore Indexes in SQL Server 2014 can be a performance game changer for workloads involving large datasets. They can also significantly affect the amount of server resource needed to provide good query performance – but not always in the ways you’d expect.
SCOM Won't Discover My SQL Server (Or Cluster)
In my previous post I discussed an instance where SCOM was failing to monitor the space of a SQL Server database. In this latest post I want to bring to light an issue that was altogether more serious.
I particularly wanted to write this post because, although there are a number of possible reasons..
SQL Server BI Edition (Licencing) now makes sense!
Under the SQL Server 2012 licencing terms running a data warehouse on the BI edition of SQL Server did not make sense if your source databases were licensed per core.