Managed Service Account Naming Convention
A while back I had to help a customer update their naming standard for their Managed Service Accounts, so I thought I would share some of those details. The...
2022-01-18
123 reads
Everyday SQL
Get Certificate Details for SQL Encryption In-Transit Using PowerShell
In my opinion, all customers should be encrypting connections to their SQL Servers to secure data in-transit, but that’s a discussion for another day. Today, I wanted to discuss...
2022-01-04
360 reads
Finding the NTFS Allocation Unit Size for Mount Points
The 64Kb Allocation Unit size is one of the easiest SQL Server best practice items to complete during your new builds, but from time to time, I still see...
2021-12-07
786 reads
PASS is Gone
On January 15, 2021, PASS will cease to exist. https://www.pass.org/PASS-Blog/ArticleID/888/ArtMID/99177/preview/true I cannot tell you how much this disappoints me. PASS has been around for my entire database career, and...
2020-12-29
4 reads
Management Studio Find & Replace Using Regular Expressions
In my last Management Studio tip, I demonstrated how you can drag and drop column names to a query window. The only part I do not like about that...
2020-07-28
14 reads
Management Studio Drag & Drop Column Names
Continuing on my recent trend of Management Studio tips, here is another that could save you a few minutes. In today’s scenario, we need to write a select statement...
2020-07-07
12 reads
SQL Server Audit Recipe – xp_cmdshell
This article assumes you already have a basic understanding of SQL Server Audit, but if not, use this link to catch...
2018-07-17
175 reads
SQL Server Morning Health Checks
Every now and again as a Microsoft PFE, you get a chance to make a big difference for a customer....
2018-01-08 (first published: 2018-01-02)
2,663 reads
Create a Whitelist for SQL Server - UPDATED!!!
A while back, I posted an article about creating a WhiteList for access to SQL Server. Since then I have...
2017-05-16
4,577 reads
Dear McAfee, Why are you destroying my buffer pool?
For the past few months, one my customers had been trying to diagnose an issue with SQL Server paging out...
2017-05-02
1,293 reads
Blogs
Learn Better: Pause to Review More
By Brian Kelley
If you want to learn better, pause more in your learning to intentionally review.
Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-Gen: Bring on the IOPS
By John
If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to...
SQL, MDX, DAX – the languages of data
By DataOnWheels
Ramblings of a retired data architect Let me start by saying that I have...
Forums
Two foreign keys to the same table. Can't cascade deletes.
Not sure if this is really a relational theory question but it seems about...
Connecting Power BI to SSAS and effective user not working
Hi everyone, Below is a consolidated summary of what we validated Architecture & data...
High Availability setup - has anyone seen this method?
Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup...
Question of the Day
Encoding URLs
I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table:
CREATE TABLE Response ( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY , ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000) ) GOIf I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use? See possible answers