One of the most fundamental concepts in any relational database management system (RDBMS), such as SQL Server, is the transaction. During my consulting career, I’ve seen many performance problems caused by developers not understanding how transactions work in SQL Server. In this tutorial, I’ll explain what transactions are, why they’re necessary, and how they work…

Naming conventions are a very subjective thing, of course. Just like coding styles, they can often lead to anything from minor debates to full-blown religious arguments. Upper case vs. lower case keywords, tabs vs. spaces, and where to put commas come to mind. Heck, these same people even get into sub-arguments about whether the terms “upper…

Continuous learning is essential to keeping up with new and changing technologies that will impact all businesses and data professionals’ jobs in the coming years. During our free webinar, The Top 4 Data Technology Trends Every DBA Should Know About in 2019, I was part of a panel of data technology experts, including dbatools.io Creator Chrissy…

SQL Server DBAs—even those who have years of experience with relational databases—frequently make the same mistakes repeatedly. Wouldn’t you like to learn about those blunders so that you can sidestep them? Well, I have good news! In a recent webinar, I counted down the 10 most common SQL Server mistakes DBAs make. Read below as I recap…

What Prompted This Post? As lots of you know already, Kevin Kline has joined us here at SQL Sentry. I’ve followed Kevin myself for a good while, so I’m really excited to have him here with us. One of the first things Kevin asked of me was to list the top 5 technical issues we…

One of the best ways to keep your data and network secure is with server auditing, which allows you to spot abnormalities or malicious activity early on and gives you time to address it before it becomes a serious problem. To make the most of server audits, you need to know some best practices and…

Considering the widespread use of Windows file servers in enterprise settings, every IT professional should have a handle on server auditing, including the use of appropriate tools to get the job done. File server auditing ensures your file server remains secure and verifies your safety measures are adequate and not breached by any malicious actors….

Description from The SentryOne community One of the things we’ve come to understand in our dealings with the Windows operating system as it relates to performance monitoring is that the performance counter system is very fragile. It doesn’t take much at all to set it off kilter and most of the time you won’t even…

Many organizations have migrated their environments from on-premises to the cloud, and one of the clouds of choice is Microsoft Azure. For SQL Server workloads, organizations can use platform as a service solutions with features like Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance or infrastructure as a service solutions with Azure SQL virtual machines. Azure SQL virtual…

One of the easier ways to improve the performance of your SQL Server and Azure SQL database queries is to ensure you choose the right data types for your data, and the data types in your application’s code match the ones in your stored procedures and queries. Choosing the right data type conserves space, because…

You probably know someone with trust issues, but do you know if your database has trust issues? In other words, does your database have Check Constraints and Foreign Keys that are not trusted? If so, it’s important to realize that SQL Server may not be able to use them for query plans and optimization, which…

When a reporting application issue occurs and users begin to complain their screens are frozen, it could be a blocking problem. This is especially likely if the issue isn’t caused by an overactive A/C vent and if users report seeing an SQL-related timeout issue. As a database administrator, you need to conduct some reactive, investigative…

Databases are at the center of most fundamental business processes. As applications become more complicated, IT infrastructures become increasingly diverse and sophisticated. This is a good thing—our IT technology is advancing, becoming more versatile and evolved. But with this evolution comes the issue of troubleshooting and problem rectification. In such wide-ranging infrastructures, finding the source…

A database management system, also called DBMS, is a program that allows admins to access, alter, and analyze a database. In this article, I’ll describe the functions of a database management system and review different types of databases. While this isn’t a comprehensive list of all DBMS types, it’s a start if you’re looking for…

During our recent SentryOne Accelerate 2020 virtual conference, I led a cloud migration panel discussion with several SQL Server experts. I asked the panelists to imagine they were riding in an elevator and someone turned to them and said, “You are really good at managing SQL Server. What tips do you have for someone like…

Cloud computing is now an integral part of business IT infrastructures, and Microsoft Azure SQL is one of the forerunners in providing cloud computing services. Using Azure, you can build, test, deploy, and manage applications in your IT environment to support better service delivery with overarching service, application, and database management. No matter how useful…

For many organizations who traditionally had to adopt expensive and usually relatively inflexible on-site database solutions, the increasing adoption of database-as-a-service (DBaaS) providers is a welcome alternative, as DBaaS offers a flexible, cloud-based database option through subscription services. Among DBaaS platforms, Microsoft Azure® SQL Database has become a go-to option for organizations hoping to move…

Big data integration and processing can be a tedious task for every organization. However, it’s needed to unlock transformational insights. With tools like Azure Data Factory, organizations can make the most of their data regardless of the source and with almost no complexities and challenges. This article will provide a quick guide to Azure Data…

The most used term for someone who is not a Database Administrator (DBA) but is tasked with looking after one or more database servers is “accidental DBA.” It can be a hard and thankless task, which is sometimes assigned to someone who has little to no experience managing a database server. This is in addition…

Many purchases you make during your life are emotional choices—buying a house or a car are near the top of that list for most people. Yes, you often still set a budget for these purchases, but you are more likely to break it based on an emotional connection. To see how emotions play into other…

There are a large number of best practices around SQL Server performance tuning – I could easily write a whole book on the topic, especially when you consider the number of different database settings, SQL Server settings, coding practices, SQL wait types, and so on that can affect performance. For this post I decided to…