Technical Article

Finding a table name from a page ID

Imagine you come to work in the morning and notice that some new rows have been entered into the msdb.dbo.suspect_pages table during the night. Usually the first thing you’re going to do is run DBCC CHECKDB, but if your database is a few TB, that could be several hours before you know where the problem is, and which table may have lost data. You want to find out which table is involved as soon as possible so you can explore your disaster recovery options.

Technical Article

5 Reasons You Must Start Capturing Baseline Data

It is widely acknowledged within the SQL Server community that baselines represent valuable information that DBAs should capture. Unfortunately, very few companies manage to log and report on this information, and DBAs are then forced to troubleshoot from the hip and scramble to find evidence to prove that the database is not the problem. This article will make a compelling argument for why DBAs must start capturing baseline information, and will create a roadmap for subsequent posts.

Blogs

Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents

By

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

Car Update: August 2026

By

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

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

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires

By Pat Wright

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires

Backing Up a DMK

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Backing Up a DMK

The Quiet Part

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Quiet Part

Visit the forum

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?

See possible answers