Production Database Administration

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are pretty straightforward. Let’s get ‘er done. LetTheDbaHandleIt: My friend needs to track who has accessed what data. This is easy at OS and app level, but how can my friend verify that those who have direct DB access are not snooping on data inappropriately? e.g. payroll or…

Over the past month (plus or minus a couple days), Erik Darling churned out dozens of posts to show how he uses different SQL Server Community Tools that are free and open source to troubleshoot SQL Server issues. You should read all of them. I did. (I also shamelessly copy/pasted this intro, plus the below,…

Some of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are open-and-shut cases. I was going to do a one-word-answers edition, but I think this is even better: gifs. GI Joe DBA: Thoughts about IT professionals Unionizing? IT professionals are in demand. Because of our demand, should we use this leverage to unionize, raise the bar, force…

Despite the continuous stream of data breaches, ransomware, and GDPR violations, some companies still aren’t encrypting personally identifiable information (PII) inside our databases or backups. I see this all the time when working with clients, but I can’t exactly talk about that or give numbers, so I decided to take a highly unscientific poll on…

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento require long, thought-out answers. Some are just one-line specials, like these: F’legend: Hi Brent, in reply to a question talking about database restores for 1TB+ you also touched on scrubbing or synthetic data as a way to populate dev environments. Are there any resources/tools you would…

Normally, after I do a round of Office Hours of going through the questions that got posted at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, I answer the highly upvoted ones and then clear the queue. If y’all didn’t upvote questions, then I don’t answer ’em. However, today I’m trying something different: I’ll post the non-upvoted questions here for y’all to…

Got questions for me? Post ’em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. I filter out the ones that are too short for video answers, and here’s the latest batch: Corrupted: Should DBCC CheckDB be run on secondary replicas in AG as well ? Is it recommended to attach corrupted…

Last week, I was reading a brand new article from a Microsoft employee about how you should directly query sys.dm_exec_requests in order to find out what’s running on your system. “Step 1: get a stone that looks round.” I lost my mind. There was a lot of yelling at the monitor. In the year 2022,…

Got questions for me? Post ’em at https://pollgab.com/room/brento and upvote the ones you’d like to see me cover. I filter out the ones that are too short for video answers, and here’s the latest batch: Thomas Franz: When I have a very large table with no statistics (or not on a specific column in the…

Not all of the questions you post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are hard. Some of ’em can be answered in one line: Q: accidentalDBA: Hi Brent, My friend is moving from two physical servers (production + failover) to VMs on the same host and SAN. His manager wants to keep log shipping as a DR solution. I…

Not all of the questions y’all post at https://pollgab.com/room/brento are hard – some of ’em can be answered in just a line or two: Q: Hany: Hello Brent, Who’s “Brent Ozar” in the Azure world? Microsoft, and I wrote why here. Q: Neutron Jack: Do you see any concerning TSQL deprecations in SQL 2022? No, neither…

Some questions that come in at https://pollgab.com/room/brento have such straightforward answers that I don’t need to cover them on video. It’s time for a rapid-fire speed round: Q: Uncle Buck: Is there a good way to tell if a given include column for a NC index is being used at all? No. Q: Steve E:…

I recorded an Office Hours stream answering a bunch of your questions quickly, but…I forgot to turn on my microphone, so the video only had the sound effects: Oops. So here are the questions in text form instead: Q: 22DBA: what performance recommendation you see people give all the time but it actually doesn’t work…

For my Office Hours streams on my Twitch channel, y’all post questions at PollGab and upvote the ones you’d like to see me discuss on the stream. However, not all questions require a video answer. Here are some simple no-brainer ones: Q: BehindTheScenesDBA: With all its limitations, what do you think about memory-optimized tables? Have you…

This week, I’m writing blog posts that can be summed up in one image. Here’s the first one: You could probably stop reading right there, but if you’re not convinced, allow me to elaborate. SQL Server 2012 support ends July 12. No, there’s not a year in that sentence, because it’s this year. No, there’s no…

Most of the time, when you need to change SQL Server’s behavior – like how it handles memory or parallelism – there are easy-to-use switches to get the job done. In SQL Server Management Studio, just right-click on the server’s name, go into Properties, and there are all kinds of things you can mess with.…