A Spectacular Case of 100% CPU Caused by Online Reindexing

An investigation of a serious performance issue during online re-indexing on a production server leads us to

interesting discoveries and solutions.

Very Hot Patches

Azure SQL Database can be patched without stopping the sqlsrvr.exe process. Quite a feat of engineering.

Implementing SQL Server Integration Services with Azure Data Factory

Azure SQL Database, unlike its on-premises counterparts, restricted its integration capabilities to those implemented directly by the database engine. To remediate this shortcoming, Microsoft provided equivalent functionality by relying on integration runtime of Azure Data Factory. In this article, you get an overview of this Azure-based SSIS offering.

Integrating SQL Server Tools into SQL Change Automation Deployments

Phil Factor shows how to integrate use of SQL Change Automation, SSMS registered servers, SMO, and BCP to automatically build or update a database on all servers in a group.

6 steps to a more secure SQL database

Security is often something people think about only after they have had a problem. Given that the average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million (SecurityIntelligence 2019) and ransomware attacks have increased 97% over the past 2 years (PhishMe 2019), the "if it's not broke, don't fix it" approach can clearly be catastrophic. Here […]

T-SQL Context Switching

Being a standards advocate, Steve has a few thoughts on team code structure.

DevOps Self-Service for Databases with SQL Clone

Phil Factor describes the freedom of being able to "self-serve" databases, during testing and development, and explains how it works with SQL Clone.

How to Use Parameters in PowerShell

Every DBA should have basic PowerShell skills. In this article, Greg Moore explains how to write a PowerShell script that takes parameters.

Which Service in Azure Should You Use for SQL?

I remember when Azure SQL Database was first released in 2010. Microsoft has tweaked the name a couple of times over the years, and back then it was called SQL Azure. The largest database you could create was just 50 GB, and there were quite a few restrictions, such as heaps not being supported. Since […]

Documenting with Tests

The idea of using more unit tests to improve code quality has been around for some time. However Steve Jones notes today that some people use tests for documentation.