SQL Server auditing has gone from a nice to have to a legal requirement, especially following new legislation like HIPAA and GDPR. Organizations are now tasked with auditing access to records, reporting suspicious and potentially malicious activity, forensically auditing data changes, as well are tracking login attempts, security changes and much more.
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Intended audience
This document is intended for application developers, database administrators and system administrator who plan to create linked servers between instances of Microsoft SQL Server using Windows Authentication.
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This is a popular story which illustrates the advantages of not just plowing away at your work, but improving your knowledge, planning, skills and preparation first to achieve a better outcome in the end
Once upon a time there were two men who lived in the same forest and decided to have a contest chopping wood. The first man was in good physical shape and very muscular. The second man was in good shape but smaller in statute and wiry. They would chop wood all day and at the end of the day compare to see who had chopped the most wood. The first man laughed to himself that there was no way this wiry little man would beat him and so they began the contest. Every 45 minutes the second smaller man would take a break and seems to just wonder off somewhere. The first man laughed again to himself and said “Yep there’s no way this wiry little man is going to beat me.” This happens several times during the day. At the end of the day the two men compare their piles of chopped wood and unbelievably enough the wiry little man has chopped twice as much wood as the more physically fit man. He says “I don’t understand. First I’m twice your size and twice your strength! On top of that every 45 minutes you rolled off and took a break or a nap or something. You must have cheated!” The smaller man says “I didn’t cheat. It was easy to beat you because every 45 minutes when you thought I was taking a break, I was out back sharpening my ax.” 1
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In this series of articles, we will navigate the SQL Server Execution Plan ocean, starting from defining the concept of the Execution Plans, walking through the types, components and operators of Execution Plans analyze execution plans and we’ll finish with how to save and administrate the Execution Plans.
When you submit a T-SQL query, you tell the SQL Server Engine what you want, but without specifying how to do it for you. Between submitting the T-SQL query to the SQL Server Database Engine and returning the query result to the end user, the SQL Server Engine will perform four internal query processing operations, to convert the query into a format that can be used by the SQL Server Storage Engine easily use to retrieve the requested data, using the processes assigned to the SQL Engine from the Operating System to work on the submitted query.
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The SQL Server transaction log is akin to a ‘Black box’ in an airliner. It contains all of the records of transactions made against a database. This information is a proverbial goldmine for database audits, recoveries etc but it was never meant to be exposed to end users let alone visualized in an easy to read manner nor used for DBA tasks. As such, utilizing this information can be a challenge, to say the least.
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I looked around for a good performance review template for a long time but I finally just sat down and wrote my own. It is a 5 pt system with various categories that cover
A client recently discovered a discrepancy on one of our reports that showed an improvement in performance metrics but was inaccurate. Our reports came from a software tool, which showed the average performance throughout the day. It derived this number from periodic checks and the frequency changed, which affected our report. When we showed an improvement in the metrics on a report, the client showed us that the frequency change may have impacted this, not necessarily any improvement in performance. In situations where we’re measuring values and comparing them to other values, how can we prevent a change in measurement from impacting our reports? Read more »
In this series, we will dive deeply in the SQL Server Indexing field, starting from the surface by understanding the internal structure of the SQL Server tables and indexes, going deeper by describing the guidelines and best practices that we can follow to design the most efficient index and what operations can be performed on the created indexes. Having these knowledges about the SQL Server indexes, we have all the tools that help us in testing the lower part of the ocean and dive deeper with the two main types of the SQL Server Indexes; the Clustered and Non-Clustered, and the other types of indexes that can be customized to serve us improving your environment. After that, the adventure becomes more interesting when learning how to use this knowledge to tune the performance of our queries and touch the bottom of the ocean. In our way back to the surface, and before celebrating our achievements, we will collect statistical information about these indexes and use this information to maintain the indexes to take benefits from it continuously and gain the best application performance.
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No matter what your position, unless perhaps you work for the post office, typically you are required to do more to earn a promotion, not just do your job long longer. The trouble is that not everyone can or will do more. Some lack the motivation, some the potential and others endurance to continually progress. For whatever reason, even if there are growth slots available, not everyone will move up and instead some will ultimately hit their career ceiling aka plateau. This concept is often described at the Peter Principle
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In SQL Server, when talking about table partitions, basically, SQL Server doesn’t directly support hash partitions. It has an own logically built function using persisted computed columns for distributing data across horizontal partitions called a Hash partition.
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When I was in the Army we all got a 2 page hard copy with a visual called “Rubber balls vs glass balls” as an analogy for balancing the many day to day priorities of being an Officer. It was a compelling article that I’ve referred back to many times in life. I’ve spent the last couple years looking for it on the web, but with no luck here is my attempt to recreate it from scratch, by memory.
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After the native installation of the SQL Server Reporting Service, we may need to customize some settings of Report Server. SQL Server Reporting Service provides a tool that is named as such; Report Server Configuration Manager. This tool helps us to customize SQL Server Reporting Service parameters and configurations. With the Report Server Configuration Manager, we can change and customize various parameters of the SQL Server Reporting Service. We can find the below settings in Report Server Configuration Manager:
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I’ve always been in favor of an orthodox strategy when it comes to applying SQL Server updates which often goes like:
A Heap table is a table in which, the data rows are not stored in any particular order within each data page. In addition, there is no particular order to control the data page sequence, that is not linked in a linked list. This is due to the fact that the heap table contains no clustered index.
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So far, we discussed many de-facto details about SQL Server database backup and restore. In this 15th article of the series, we are going to discuss, the file-group and piecemeal database backup and restore process.
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As our company has grown, we’ve recently added developers to our team who want to use open source tools (open source languages and libraries). In the past, we built and used our own custom libraries, but our new developers to prefer to use open source libraries or add new languages that require new libraries. We’re concerned that the use of open source libraries may not be secure and may introduce new inputs and outputs in our system that we don’t fully understand. What should we consider when we think about allowing open source software, tools or languages in our environment from the standpoint of security? Read more »
A good friend of mine and co-speaker at SQLGrillen this year, Paul Broadwith (@Pauby), said this during a practice run of our presentation, not in a Steve Ballmer way thankfully. Although we were talking about open source projects at the time, the concept applies to blogging, organising and speaking at user groups or conferences, everything Community related really.
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Fixing bad queries and resolving performance problems can involve hours (or days) of research and testing. Sometimes we can quickly cut that time by identifying common design patterns that are indicative of poorly performing TSQL.
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A Key Performance Indicator aka KPI is a metric which objectively measures the numeric equivalent of goals or targets of a company, team or an organization. Any individual or a community which has a numerical target can measure success of their goal with key performance indicators.
In all business roles and levels, if you manage a team you most likely have to set at least one key performance indicator and try influence this metric to show a positive result or trend. KPIs should be both logical and achievable. If not, team motivation and morale may decrease as a result of loss of self-confidence. For this reason, we have to be careful and logical when we set key performance indicators. At the same time, we have to check KPIs at regular intervals to determine if they remain valid. We can illustrate a typical KPI life cycle below.
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Error handling in SQL Server gives us control over the Transact-SQL code. For example, when things go wrong, we get a chance to do something about it and possibly make it right again. SQL Server error handling can be as simple as just logging that something happened, or it could be us trying to fix an error. It can even be translating the error in SQL language because we all know how technical SQL Server error messages could get making no sense and hard to understand. Luckily, we have a chance to translate those messages into something more meaningful to pass on to the users, developers, etc.
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In the previous articles, we discussed several ways of taking backup and testing the restore process to ensure the integrity of the backup file.
In this article, we’re going to discuss the importance of the database backup reporting. This kind of reporting will be designed to eliminate any unnecessary risk that may arise with the safety and security of information. This is the reason, the high-level report; Daily Health Check report will be generated and sent to the SME or to the DBA responsible for IT Infra management.
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The WRITELOG wait type is one of those wait types that can often be seen quite frequently on SQL Server, and that can cause a lot of headaches for DBAs. The WRITELOG wait time represents the time that accumulates while waiting for the content of the transaction log cache to be flushed to the physical disk that stores the transaction log file. To understand better the WTITELOG wait type, there are some basics of SQL Server mechanism for storing the data in the transaction log file is to be explained first
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Intended audience
This document is intended for database administrators who would like to be prepared or who experience performance issues with one or more Linked Server(s) to an Oracle Database instance using the OraOLEDb Linked Server provider.
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