EightKB 2026: Registration is Open!
It’s that time of year again! EightKB is back on August 20th at 13:00 UTC, and registration is open right now. It’s completely free. No catch, just a full...
2026-08-06
16 reads
Anthony Nocentino
Using Claude Code as a Database SRE Agent with the Everpure Fusion MCP Server
Here’s the scenario: one of my SQL Server instances migrated to the DR array. The VM moved, the old volumes were destroyed, and nobody created a Protection Group on...
2026-07-27 (first published: 2026-07-17)
428 reads
Microsoft MVP 2026: Ten Years on the Data Platform
I’m honored to announce that I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the tenth consecutive year, recognized in the Azure SQL and SQL Server technical areas under Data...
2026-07-16
43 reads
Giving AI Agents Visibility Into SQL Server with MCP
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to make an AI agent genuinely useful for database work, both for administration and for application access to...
2026-06-12 (first published: 2026-05-24)
442 reads
Crash-Consistent MongoDB Snapshot and Restore with Everpure Fusion
I’ve been working on a project that combines two things I spend a lot of time with: MongoDB sharded clusters and Everpure FlashArrays. The goal is a production-grade backup...
2026-06-04
31 reads
Using T-SQL Snapshot Backup - Hyper-V Edition
If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to...
2026-06-01 (first published: 2026-05-08)
210 reads
Crash-Consistent Snapshot Cloning - Hyper-V Edition
If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, most of what I’ve covered requires SQL Server to participate in the snapshot: the write IO freeze, the metadata backup,...
2026-05-25 (first published: 2026-05-08)
140 reads
Designing a Storage Load Test for SQL Server
I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both as a consultant and now in my work at Everpure, and I see the same...
2026-05-11 (first published: 2026-04-27)
230 reads
Introducing the SQL Server on Kubernetes Operator
Are you considering replatforming your SQL Server workload due to recent vendor changes, but still need high availability and disaster recovery? You’re not alone. One of the challenges with...
2026-04-22 (first published: 2026-04-12)
303 reads
Walking Through a Planned Failover: SQL Server Always On Availability Groups on Kubernetes
When building the sql-on-k8s-operator, I wanted to make sure it could handle both planned and unplanned failovers. The easy case is a planned failover, where you deliberately move the...
2026-04-20 (first published: 2026-04-19)
79 reads
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
Backing Up a DMK
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Backing Up a DMK
The Quiet Part
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Question of the Day
Backing Up a DMK
In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
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