Explore essential SQL Server security best practices for large enterprises. This blog covers encryption, access control, infrastructure security, threat detection, and compliance to enhance data protection, ensure regulatory adherence and more. Learn what more you can do to secure your critical production SQL Server environments.
Author: Stephen Planck
Optimizing Large Tables in SQL Server Using Table Partitioning
SQL Server table partitioning is an invaluable feature for improving database performance and management, especially for large-scale databases. This blog post provides an overview of setting up and managing partitioned tables in SQL Server, using TSQL commands. Partitioning helps manage large tables by dividing them into smaller, more manageable segments known as partitions. Each partition can be stored on a separate filegroup, enhancing query performance and simplifying maintenance tasks such as backups and index rebuilds.
System Level Performance Tuning for SQL Server 2022 on Linux
Running SQL Server on Linux offers many advantages, including cost savings and robust management tools. To fully realize these benefits, certain Linux-specific configurations must be tuned. This post focuses on three specific areas: I/O scheduler, swapfiles, and swappiness. So let’s jump in and start tinkering!
Capturing SQL Server Inventory with PowerShell
Maintaining an accurate and comprehensive inventory of your SQL Server environment is crucial for effective database management, ensuring security, and meeting compliance requirements. With PowerShell, database administrators can automate the collection of detailed information about SQL Server instances and databases, streamlining the inventory process. This blog post introduces a PowerShell script designed to efficiently gather SQL Server inventory data, separating instance-level information from database-specific details into two distinct reports.
Ensuring Optimal Execution Plans in SQL Server
Explore professional strategies for managing SQL Server Plan Regression. This guide offers insight into preventing performance degradation through efficient execution plan selection and maintenance, ensuring optimal query performance in SQL Server environments.
Migrating SQL Server On-Prem Workloads to Azure Virtual Machines
Migrating from an on-premises SQL Server to an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) encompasses not just a technological shift but also a strategic transformation that demands foresighted planning and preparation. This refined approach focuses on the preliminary steps necessary to ensure not just a seamless transition but also an optimized post-migration environment. Emphasizing benchmarking your current infrastructure and tailoring capacity planning to the specific types of workloads being migrated, this guide aims to lay a solid foundation for your move to Azure.
SQL Server Stress Testing: A Step-by-Step Guide Using ostress
Today we will explore a practical approach to enhancing the performance of your SQL Server instances using ostress. This tool, part of the RML Utilities for SQL Server, is a game-changer for database administrators and developers looking to simulate heavy workloads and ensure their databases can handle the pressures of real-world applications. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the essentials of downloading RML Utilities, setting up your test environment, and leveraging ostress for performance testing.
Understanding and Diagnosing SQL Server Wait Types
In SQL Server, wait types are important indicators of where and why delays occur during query execution, directly impacting database performance. Properly understanding and diagnosing these wait types enable database administrators to pinpoint specific performance bottlenecks. This blog post aims to provide an overview of essential wait types that demand attention, distinguish common wait types that can usually be ignored, and offer strategies for effective diagnosis and interpretation to enhance overall database performance.
Automating Data Insertion into SQL Server with PowerShell
PowerShell is a powerful scripting language that can automate a wide range of tasks, including database operations. In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to create a DataTable in PowerShell, populate it with random data, and then save that data into a table in SQL Server using SqlBulkCopy. We will first look at what is required for this task and then we’ll script it out.
Unraveling the Mystery of SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server execution plans are invaluable tools for diagnosing and optimizing database queries. They provide a visual representation of the operations SQL Server performs to execute a query. Understanding how to read these plans is essential for identifying performance bottlenecks and optimizing query performance. This post will guide you through understanding and reading execution plans, highlighting what to look for in poorly performing plans, and offering strategies to find and remove bad plans.