Installation, setup and configuration

James Rhoat

SQL Server Setup – Instant File Initialization (IFI)

August 31, 2018 by

If SQL Server needs to allocate space, first it fills the space it needs with zeros. Examples of when it needs to allocate space are creating/restoring a database, growing/allocating data and log files, and finally the troublesome auto growth operation. However, most of these slowdowns/long running actions can be improved by enabling instant file initialization. I say most because the one case where this is required is on log file growth. However, even when Instant file initialization has been enabled the log file will be zeroed out before the space is usable for SQL Server.

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James Rhoat

SQL Server Dedicated Admin Connection (DAC) – how to enable, connect and use

August 31, 2018 by

The dedicated admin connection (DAC) can help you out of a sticky situation. This was built to help you connect to SQL Server and run basic queries in cases with critical performance problems. This works by telling SQL Server to reserve a thread specifically for processing your queries in an emergency. While it does reserve a connection for you, it is only one thread, there is no parallelism happening here, in fact, you will receive an error.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to setup custom SQL Server transactional replication with a central publisher and multiple subscriber databases

August 29, 2018 by

In this article, you’ll learn how to setup a simple, custom distributed database replication system.

Introduction

In general, a typical setup of transactional replication model of a central publisher with multiple subscribers includes the creation of a replica database(s) which may serve multiple purposes including:

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to set up a DDL and DML SQL Server database transactional replication solution

August 22, 2018 by

In the article How to setup SQL Server database replication for reporting Server we discussed all about setting up a simple SQL Server transactional replication environment. In this article, we’ll simulate a more robust system that replicates faster and includes both DDL and DML statements. We’ll walk-through the steps to setup a dynamic transactional replication.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Getting started with Azure Data Studio (ADS); initial installation and configuration

August 14, 2018 by

Microsoft Azure Data Studio is a new GUI-based (vs CLI) lightweight tool for developing and managing your modern SQL databases. The tool resembles Microsoft’s lightweight code editor, the open source IDE Visual Studio Code in terms of functionalities and the UI in general. If you’ve used Visual Studio Code (or VS Code), you’d feel at home with Azure Data Studio. Azure Data Studio also integrates really well other products like Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse has been made very simple. Azure Data Studio is a cross-platform tool available for Linux, Windows, and Mac to manage the SQL Server databases. You can go ahead and download Microsoft Azure Data Studio to try it out!

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Marko Zivkovic

How to install and configure Azure Data Studio for Windows

February 1, 2018 by

Azure Data Studio is free, lightweight database development and operations cross-platform tool for private and commercial usage, that can be installed on Windows, macOS, and Linux for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Azure Data Studio is built to simplify work of database developers, database administrators, and system administrators. Azure Data Studio boosts your productivity with smart code snippets, keyword completion, IntelliSense, source control integration, the ability to view and save results in CSV, Excel, JSON format, and the capability to organize and manage favorite database connections, etc. The first version of Azure Data Studio was released in November 2017.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to configure SQL Server 2017 on Linux with mssql-conf and other available tools

December 13, 2017 by

Configuration of any system plays a vital role in its working efficiently. However, configuring a system needs not necessarily be a daunting task. There are several tools that help with the process.

SQL Server on Linux provides a wide range of options for configuration, management and administration.

  1. mssql-conf
  2. Transact-SQL
  3. SQL Server Management Studio
  4. PowerShell
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Bojan Petrovic

How to configure database mail in SQL Server

November 22, 2017 by

Database Mail, as you would expect from its name, is a solution for sending e-mail messages from the SQL Server Database Engine to users. Using Database Mail, database applications can send e-mail messages that can, for example, contain query results or simply alert a user about an event that occurred in the database.

The process of Database Mail configuration has three main steps. In order to complete this successfully, we need to:

  • create a Database Mail account,
  • create a Database Mail profile,
  • and configure those two to work together
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Prashanth Jayaram

How to set up SQL Server Log Shipping on Linux

November 13, 2017 by

Log shipping is a high-availability configuration that perhaps most of us are familiar with. It’s one of the oldest techniques wherein we ship transaction logs from a Primary database to a Secondary database. Log Shipping is still a vital feature used in case of applications that use warm standby for Disaster Recovery. We can see many articles which discuss the process of configuring Log shipping using T-SQL or SSMS.

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Marko Zivkovic
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How to create and configure a linked server in SQL Server Management Studio

June 9, 2017 by

Linked servers allow submitting a T-SQL statement on a SQL Server instance, which returns data from other SQL Server instances. A linked server allows joining data from several SQL Server instances using a single T-SQL statement when data exists on multiple databases on different SQL instances. By using a linked server to retrieve data from several SQL instances, the only thing that should be done is to connect to one SQL instance.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Installation of SQL Server vNext CTP on Linux Distribution CentOS 7

May 10, 2017 by

It was a paradigm shift in December 2016, when Microsoft made their SQL Server database available for Linux; it was the first time in history that Microsoft ever designed SQL Server to run on a non-Windows operating system. SQL Server vNext was released for public preview so the user community could test and deploy SQL Server on a Linux operating system. Microsoft took a major step in diversifying the database technology into the non-windows platform for the first time.

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Marko Zivkovic
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How to install Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB

May 9, 2017 by

Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB, a solution primarily intended for developers, is a lightweight version of SQL Server Express. It is very easy to install and set up. The installation copies a minimum set of files which are necessary to start SQL Server Database Engine. LocalDB supports the same T-SQL language and has the same limitations as SQL Server Express.

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Vitor Montalvão

How to download and install the SQL Server Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA v2.0)

April 19, 2017 by

Introduction

I had the opportunity to work and perform various tests with Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA) Technical Preview 1 (DEA v1) and also worked closely to DEA’s development team by reporting some issues and have their feedback on how to solve most of them. Some issues were really bugs and they had them fixed in this new release, the DEA Technical Preview 2 (DEA v2.0).

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Ahmad Yaseen

How to Configure Read-Only Routing for an Availability Group in SQL Server 2016

March 23, 2017 by

The SQL Server Always On Availability Groups concept was introduced the first time in SQL Server 2012 as an enterprise-level high availability and disaster recovery solution that will replace the database mirroring feature. Always On Availability Group provides a high availability solution on the groups level, where each group can contain any number of databases that can be replicated to multiple secondary servers known as Replicas.

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Minette Steynberg

Configuring the Azure SQL Database Firewall

February 28, 2017 by

Introduction

The Azure SQL Database firewall lets you decide which IP addresses may or may not have access to either your Azure SQL Server or your Azure SQL database.

When creating an Azure SQL Database, the firewall needs to be configured before anyone will be able to access the database. By default, no external access to your SQL Database will be allowed until you explicitly assign permission by creating a firewall rule.

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Best Practices for Configuring Newly Installed SQL Server Instances

January 20, 2017 by

Often we install SQL Server on clients or we get to clients where they have pre-installed SQL Server Instances. As a DBA we have the Primary responsibility of keeping the Database Up and Running. This responsibility leads to optimizing, performance tuning and many other stuff related to database’s internal objects. While keeping the other aspects in mind many of us have to go through the configuration of the newly installed or pre-installed but un-configured instances. Configuring SQL Server newly instances are not an easy task and a DBA might want to configure an Instance in many ways.

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How to install the SQL Server Utility Control Point and configure multiple instances for monitoring

January 16, 2017 by

As we progress in our career as a SQL Server Database Administrators we encounter situations where managing and monitoring a large number of SQL Servers is the daily job requirement. Monitoring SQL Server is a very vast and detailed area of study. Out of all the monitoring the very basis and critical monitoring in the Resource Utilization Monitoring for SQL Server.

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