With Availability Groups there has always been a common theme across the industry to offload your database backups to a secondary replica. It sounds great in theory. I know people that have done this. I also know people that “thought” they were doing this. But the question is, should you be doing this? Backup Types…More

I started my blog to push the boundaries of what I believe to be true. I’ve been very successful throughout my career as a DBA, regardless of the role I’ve held. It’s something that’s always come easy to me, and most concepts just clicked from day one. Time after time, a problem would arise, and…More

To be honest, this is not something I ever thought I needed to know. Until one day, I found a database where transactions were failing due to ‘PRIMARY’ filegroup is full errors. So, I did what any DBA would have done, and checked if auto-growth was enabled. It was. So, why was the file no…More

It’s been a a several weeks since Microsoft started releasing details on SQL Server 2022. Here are two of the new features I’m most interested in. Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization Parameter Sniffing has been plaguing SQL Server for years, and it sounds like Microsoft is finally putting some real effort into fixing the problem. Traditionally,…More

You’ve taken a new job ! You’re now responsible for 50+ SQL Sever instances, maybe more. What do you plan to do in your first 30, 60 or 90 days? Make sure backups are running? Make sure consistency checks are running? Implement maintenance routines, if none already exist? Those are all great ideas and things…More

Something I see regularly is developers trying to write stored procedures to service multiple update scenarios. They typically accomplish this by adding multiple input parameters to the stored procedure and then using an OR operator in the update statement to match the parameter that a value was provided for. In many scenarios this works okay…More