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SQL Database: How to Configure Active Geo-Replication

Active Geo-location is powerful magic for ensuring the high availability of a Azure SQL database, and for disaster-recovery. In choosing the best options, you need to accurately understand the value that the business places on the service you're running, long it will take for a secondary replica to be in synch with the primary replica, the importance of spreading the location of replicas widely, and the maximum tolerable unscheduled downtime. Just clicking all the options could prove to be expensive.

2016-10-27

3,361 reads

External Article

Master Data Services – The Basics

Master Data Services (MDS) is Microsoft's platform for supporting Master Data Management (MDM). A system like MDS, if properly maintained, gives organisations a powerful alternative to increasingly having to centralize databases as a way of preventing data from getting out sync or become inconsistent, and a reliable way of managing the flow of data through corporate IT systems. It makes microservice architectures realistic. Hari Yadav shows you how to get up and running with MDS.

2016-10-25

4,165 reads

External Article

PowerShell Just Enough Administration

A major difficulty for a System Administrator who wishes to provide access for auditors, Helpdesk staff, developers and other IT people is that adminstrator roles give users more access than they need. It is too easy to make mistakes, or to make more changes than those that were signed-off. With JEA, it is possible to create role-based access control (RBAC) endpoints that define precisely what actions you’ll let your users carry out without needing a elevated, privileged administrator credentials, and which log and report all operations.

2016-10-19

3,276 reads

External Article

In-Memory OLTP: Row Visibility in SQL Server’s MVCC

SQL Server's In-memory OLTP is fast, due to its multi-valued concurrency control (MVCC). MVCC avoids the need for locks by arranging for each user connected to the database to see a snapshot of the rows of the tables at a point in time, No changes made by the user will be seen by other users of the database until the changes have been completed and committed. It is conceptually simple but does the user always see the correct version of a row under all circumstances? Shel Burkow explains.

2016-10-17

3,150 reads

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Multiple Deployment Processes

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Upgrading Admin Queries

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Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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