Brian Knight

Brian Knight, MCSE, MCDBA, is on the Board of Directors for the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) and runs the local SQL Server users group in Jacksonville. Brian is a contributing columnist for SQL Magazine and also maintains a weekly column for the database website SQLServerCentral.com. He is the author of Admin911: SQL Server (Osborne/McGraw-Hill Publishing) and co-author of Professional SQL Server DTS (Wrox Press). Brian is a Senior SQL Server Database Consultant at Alltel in Jacksonville and spends most of his time deep in DTS and SQL Server.

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Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents

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A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...

Car Update: August 2026

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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

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An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...

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Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires

By Pat Wright

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Backing Up a DMK

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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The Quiet Part

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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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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