Microsoft has been pretty clear about their commitment to the entire Azure infrastructure. The updates to Azure come out on a massively accelerated schedule. Because of this, they’re doing lots of code on lots of things that may, one day, end up in your full blown SQL Server instance, but… Read more

One of my favorite additions to SQL Server 2012 is the Availability Groups, referred to as AlwaysOn. These things are awesome. It’s basically shared nothing clustering at a database-by-database level. You can set up a series of secondary machines that will enable you to failover a database in the… Read more

Let’s be honest. Database administration is not all that tough. Set up your backups. Test them. Get consistency checks on line. Some maintenance routines for statistics and maybe for fragmentation are also helpful. Set up security. In most of the important ways, you’re done. Sit back, monitor the whole thing… Read more

I was searching all over the place to try to find out how to move files into Azure Storage. Most of the examples I could track down were for API calls through C#. There were very few examples using PowerShell, and most of those were for older versions of Azure.… Read more

Welcome to Teched 2013

We’re starting off with some type of James Bond video. Chase scene with a really cool car. Not quite French Connection, but good. OK, that was, if a little ballsy, “you’ll never crack it” Jeez, how to upset people. And the car from the video drives… Read more

We are bringing Red Gate, through the free SQL in the City event, to the United States again this year.

This event has been hosted in London multiple times, Los Angeles, New York, Austin, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. It’s a fun day of training, presentations, and networking, all done… Read more

I’m working on a series of Powershell scripts for the pre-conference seminars on Windows Azure SQL Database that I’m going to be giving at TechEd and the PASS Summit. One of the things I want to do is script out a full backup process (one that’s consistent with transactions)… Read more

You know how we’ve always heard that sp_msforeachtable and other similar undocumented functions may not be supported in future versions of SQL Server? Have you tried running something like this on any of your Windows Azure SQL Databases yet:

EXEC sp_msforeachtable 'select ''?'', count(*) from ?'

Try it out.

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No, this isn’t some complaint about PASS or the Summit. This is an announcement that not only will I be speaking at the PASS Summit, but I’m speaking about Azure… a lot.

First up, I’m going to be doing an all-day pre-conference seminar specifically aimed at getting you into Azure.… Read more

Get an invite to a Microsoft meeting? Are they using the new Lync interface? And, you don’t have a paid Office365 account do you? So, you click the link, figure it’ll open a web browser and off you go, right?

Wrong.

Instead it opens up a Lync app that you… Read more

Or, I guess it might be more appropriate to say that Powershell does Azure. Regardless, there are a set of commandlets for Azure and Azure SQL Database. Here’s the link to get you started and the basic documentation. After that, it’s a little tricky to know for sure what’s required.… Read more

I’m trying to improve.

That’s at just about everything too. I know I don’t know enough or have enough skills to always get things done in an efficient manner, so I’m trying to learn more. One way is by reading, a lot. I’ve read a number of management and leadership… Read more

The very concept of the Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD) is predicated on the up-time created by having three active copies of your database. Should there be a hardware or software failure that would cause the primary replica to go down, your database gets moved to one of the secondary… Read more

You can get backups of your WASD databases. But, if you want them to be transactionally consistent, you need to do a little extra work. This video (with bad lighting at the start) shows how to get the job done.

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Microsoft has stated pretty clearly that they’re putting code on Azure first, ahead of the desktop. Which makes one wonder when we’re going to start to see some of this cool stuff within SSMS. What cool stuff you ask? Well, let me explain. Let’s start with a query:

SELECT	m.MovieName,…

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Laws of Thermodynamics

TANSTAAFL

Gods of the Copybook Headings

All magic comes with a price

Winter Is Coming

My adult years started with a pretty thorough education in physics thanks to Uncle Sugar and the Navy Nuclear Power School. The laws of thermodynamics were carved into our brains (along with… Read more

GAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

I feel slightly better, but only slightly.

I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix just to unwind my brain and relax a little. Instead of relaxation I found myself pacing back and forth in front of the television, gesticulating wildly, with a string expletives coming out… Read more

The greatest part of my job is that I get to travel all over the world to present different technical sessions. But, it’s not the presentations that make it cool. It’s the fact that I get to meet people. I get a chance to hang out with my #sqlfamily. I… Read more

I jumped at the opportunity to write a chapter for this book, Pro SQL Server 2012 Practices, because of all the fantastic people writing and the topics that were covered. I reviewed Chapter 12 a few weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to get this chapter, Big Data for… Read more

I earned my nickname. I’m proud of it. I am the Scary DBA. I don’t really like to advertise my other nickname, Rant (get it, Grant shortened to another word). I earned that one too. I’m not proud of it at all. I got that one because I sometimes don’t… Read more