How to set up SQL Server Log Shipping on Linux November 13, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram 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. Read more »
Setting up the dark theme in SQL Server management studio September 28, 2017 by Bojan Petrovic In SSMS 2016 Microsoft introduced visual setting option to choose between Blue and Light color theme. In both SSMS 2016 and the latest SSMS 17, the user can switch between the Blue or Light theme by going to Tools > Options > Environment > General > Color theme: Read more »
How to configure a Linked Server using the ODBC driver August 17, 2017 by Marko Zivkovic Microsoft Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is an application programming interface (API) designed to access data from a different of database management systems (DBMS). ODBC is designed for relational data stores. Read more »
How to create and configure a linked server in SQL Server Management Studio June 9, 2017 by Marko Zivkovic 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. Read more »
How to install SQL Server on Ubuntu May 18, 2017 by Stefan Veselinovic Introduction With an increasing number of new servers running on Linux, and even a third of Microsoft’s Azure virtual machines running Linux, they have made a choice to bring SQL Server to Linux in order to increase their market share and attract new customers. Read more »
Installation of SQL Server vNext CTP on Linux Distribution CentOS 7 May 10, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram 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. Read more »
How to install Microsoft SQL Server Express LocalDB May 9, 2017 by Marko Zivkovic 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. Read more »
Running SQL Server Containers on Windows Server 2016 Core April 21, 2017 by Andrew Pruski SQL Server & Containers There’s a lot of buzz around containers at the moment but not so much in the SQL Server world which I find odd as, to me as a SQL Server DBA, the technology has a lot of benefits that are worth exploring especially when it comes to development environments. Read more »
How to download and install the SQL Server Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA v2.0) April 19, 2017 by Vitor Montalvão 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). Read more »
How to Configure Read-Only Routing for an Availability Group in SQL Server 2016 March 23, 2017 by Ahmad Yaseen 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. Read more »
Configuring the Azure SQL Database Firewall February 28, 2017 by Minette Steynberg 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. Read more »
How to install, configure and use SQL Server Distributed Replay February 1, 2017 by Vitor Montalvão Introduction The Microsoft SQL Server Distributed Replay feature has been provided by Microsoft since SQL Server 2012 and it is used to replay captured traces against an upgraded test environment. Read more »
Best Practices for Configuring Newly Installed SQL Server Instances January 20, 2017 by Musab Umair 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. Read more »
How to install the SQL Server Utility Control Point and configure multiple instances for monitoring January 16, 2017 by Musab Umair 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. Read more »
How to download and install the SQL Server Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA) January 12, 2017 by Vitor Montalvão Introduction The Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA) is a new Experimental solution provided by Microsoft used to help upgrading databases from older SQL Server versions (MSSQL 2005 or higher versions) to the more recent ones (MSSQL 2012 or higher versions). It accomplished this based in a given workload that is previously captured from the source database and later replayed on the target SQL Server instances for comparison. Read more »
How to create and configure Microsoft Azure HDInsight November 18, 2016 by Daniel Calbimonte Introduction In our chapter about PolyBase, we presented this new SQL Server 2016 feature to query CSV files stored in Azure Storage accounts. We mentioned that in PolyBase you can query data in Hadoop (HDInsight) using SQL Server. HDInsight is a very popular system in Azure that eventually you will need to interact with if you use SQL Server. That is why we will give an explanation for newbies about it. Read more »
SQL Server 2016 Database Scoped Configuration October 21, 2016 by Ahmad Yaseen SQL Server 2016 introduces a new set of configurations that can be applied at the database level to control its performance and behavior. These configurations were previously applicable only at the SQL instance level before version SQL Server 2016, With the ability to configure settings at the database level, many databases that are hosted in the same instance can now be isolated from each other, with each database has its own customized configurations. The database level configurations allow us also to set different database configurations for the Always On Availability Groups primary and secondary databases to meet the different types of workloads. Read more »
What’s new in the SQL Server 2016 installation? July 13, 2016 by Ahmad Yaseen SQL Server 2016 introduced officially on the 1st of June 2016. It comes with many new features such as Query Store that maintains the execution plans history for the queries with its performance data in order to detect any slowness in the query caused by the new plans, so that the administrator can force the use of the better old plan. Read more »
SQL Server network configuration June 14, 2016 by Ahmad Yaseen SQL Server Network Configuration involves enabling the protocols that manage the connection to the SQL Server and configuring the available options for these network protocols. It also provides the means to encrypt the communication between the SQL Server instance and the client applications and hide the SQL Server instance from being browsed. SQL Server Network Configuration can be managed using the SQL Server Configuration Manager tool. Read more »
Installing SQL Server 2016 June 7, 2016 by Robert Seles Introduction Microsoft SQL Server 2016 provides faster transactions and queries, deeper insights on any device, advanced analytics, new security technology, and new hybrid cloud scenarios. Along with these features, comes the new installation setup. Although it is similar to the installation of SQL Server 2014 and other older versions, there are few notable differences: Read more »
