New Azure VMs that perform close to on-prem servers?!
Working with large databases, multi-terabyte in size, I've had clients who have wanted to move to the cloud. However, after testing and...
2025-06-12
8 reads
Jeff Taylor
Cloud Provider Outage!
Your Cloud Provider is experiencing an outage! Your websites and databases are all down! When local data centers were the primary source...
2025-06-12
6 reads
Getting Started with SQL Server 2025 Public Preview: A Step-by-Step Installation Guide
A step-by-step guide to installing SQL Server 2025 Private Preview.
2025-06-04
6 reads
Uninstall PolyBase from SQL Server
If you have SQL Server 2019 or SQL Server 2022 installed with PolyBase and you try to install SQL Server 2025, it will fail during...
2025-05-24
53 reads
SQL Server Autogrowth Settings Changes
Today, I want to discuss a topic that has been a bit of a headache for database administrators and consultants: the changes to SQL...
2024-02-01
5 reads
Testing Microsoft Fabric - Part 4
After several discussions with the Microsoft team and chatting with Sunil Sabat about the testing I was conducting, the conclusion was...
2024-01-03
8 reads
Testing Microsoft Fabric - Part 3
Sorry to disappoint you. In this post, we won't test Microsoft Fabric directly. We will compare Azure Data Factory (ADF) to Microsoft...
2023-11-30
6 reads
Testing Microsoft Fabric - Part 2
To quickly summarize where we are, we started testing Microsoft Fabric with a 10GB tar file, which took over 20 hours to extract, and now...
2023-11-24
6 reads
Testing Microsoft Fabric - Part 1
Shortly after Microsoft Fabric came out a few months ago, I created an account and started playing around. I love to push technology to...
2023-11-14
6 reads
Data Types - Does size really matter? - nvarchar vs. varchar
How many of us have created a new table and used the default and first data type nvarchar for all of the text/alphanumeric fields, or had...
2023-08-18
7 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
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Quiet Part
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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