One of the first things I review when I inherit a new SQL Server environment is the SQL Agent jobs. I can learn a tremendous amount about an organization simply by reviewing what runs on a schedule. Backups. Integrity checks. Index maintenance. Reporting. Monitoring. ETL processes. SQL Agent often becomes the operational heartbeat of a Read More …
This is it. The final chapter of PowerShell Strikes Back. Over the past four weeks, you’ve built a real foundation. You know that single quotes are literal and double quotes expand variables. You know how to store and use data in variables – strings, integers, booleans, and hashtables. You know how to loop over a Read More …
Welcome back to PowerShell Strikes Back. We’re three weeks in, and the training is paying off. In Week 1, we learned that quotes are not interchangeable. In Week 2, we put variables to work – storing server names, config values, service objects, and boolean results. If you’ve been following along and running the examples in Read More …
This is Week 2 of PowerShell Strikes Back – a four-week May series for SQL Server DBAs who have dabbled in PowerShell but never stopped to nail down the fundamentals. If you missed Week 1 on single vs double quotes, start there first – it’ll make this post land better. Last week, we learned that Read More …
This is Week 1 of PowerShell Strikes Back – a four-week May series for SQL Server DBAs who have dabbled in PowerShell but never stopped to nail down the fundamentals. New posts every Monday in May. May the 4th be with you. A long time ago, in a query window far, far away, a DBA Read More …
If you’ve been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server, PowerShell, and the day-to-day work of being a DBA. Execution plans, availability groups, dbatools scripts – that’s my lane and I’m happy in it. So fair warning: this one is a little different. No T-SQL. No code blocks. Just something that’s Read More …
It’s 2 AM. Your phone is going off. Users can’t connect to the application, and when you open SSMS to investigate, the connection spinner just keeps spinning. SQL Server is alive; you can see the process running, but it’s too overwhelmed to let you in. You need to get in there and kill something, but Read More …
Hello, dear blog reader. Today’s post is coming to you straight from the home office, ready to talk about a topic that comes up more than you’d think: storing PDF documents inside SQL Server. Whether it’s invoices, reports, scanned forms, or contracts, applications often need somewhere to park files. You could store them on a Read More …
In SQL Server environments where transactional replication runs alongside Always On Availability Groups (AGs), DBAs sometimes face a frustrating scenario: replication stalls when a secondary replica or subscriber is offline for maintenance, patching, or unexpected downtime. By default, SQL Server’s Log Reader Agent is cautious. It only marks transactions as ready for replication once they Read More …
Whether you’re a seasoned DBA or just exploring database tools, DBeaver offers a powerful, cross-platform GUI for interacting with PostgreSQL and many other databases. As a continuation of the previous blog post on installing PostgreSQL, this guide will walk through installing DBeaver and setting up a connection to the PostgreSQL instance we created. Step Read More …
