Phil Factor demonstrates how to use Extended Events to detect acquisition of Intent locks, and so determine which databases are active or apparently 'dormant', and then on which tables data has been modified recently, or which views and stored procedures have been run.
2021-01-28
One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated. On investigation, it appears that several transactions running over that period were using a lot of space in tempdb. However, which of them, if any, are causing the tempdb bottleneck, and why?
2021-01-26
If you have SQL Compare, then the SQL Snapper utility is very valuable 'extra' for certain team activities, because it can be freely distributed. It means that any developer can create a SQL Compare snapshot from databases that are on their local workstation and store them on the network.
2021-01-22
This article explains ten ways that SQL Monitor tackles the problem of scaling out the coverage of a single, lightweight monitoring system, and so allows your teams to maintain the health and performance of larger collections of databases and higher numbers of monitored SQL servers.
2021-01-19
SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare can be used together, from the command line, to provide a complete build process, or to script out changes to both the database and its development data. For doing this routinely, I find it easiest to script the operation using PowerShell.
2021-01-15
Phil Factor takes a staged approach to generating development data, creating one project that simply copies data from an existing database, another that copies most data but generates any personal or sensitive data, and a third that starts from 'anonymized' data and then generates other columns entirely and increase the number of rows for testing.
2021-01-14
Phil Factor takes a strategic look at common SQL data masking techniques, and the challenges inherent in masking certain types of sensitive and personal data, while ensuring that it still looks like the real data, and retains its referential integrity, and distribution characteristics.
2021-01-11
Have you ever had to demonstrate a database-driven application, and longed to have the real data to do so? To do what, precisely? Well, so you can then scroll through the customers who have used the system, demonstrate the accounting and audit, browse through the products, maybe even demo the customer tracking system with comments, complaints and so on. All this is possible, using realistic, fake data.
2021-01-08
Phil Factor explores a lesser-known capability of SQL Compare, which is to help you maintain a 'traditional', well-documented, single file build script, for creating the current version of the database during development.
2021-01-06
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2021-01-05
I am very excited and lucky to be speaking once again at SQLBits along...
By Steve Jones
Today’s coping tip is to try something new to get out of your comfort...
Monitoring for Problems The encryption of your existing data occurs as a background process...
Hello everyone I hope everyone's ok. I have this query and I'm trying to...
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