Database engineer with a passion for automation
Active Directory groups are used all over our IT estates. They can be used to simplify managing SQL Server access (Discover SQL Server Permissions hidden via AD Group Membership) as well as for other applications. One of my favourite commands from the ActiveDirectory PowerShell module is Get-AdUser, specifically when used in the following snippet: This…
Log shipping is a SQL Server feature used for disaster-recovery where the transaction log backups are ‘shipped’ from your production instance to a secondary instance. This enables you to cutover to this secondary server in the event of a disaster where you lose your primary instance. Log shipping is not a new feature but is…
I found myself needing to clear out a large amount of data from a table this week as part of a clean up job. In order to avoid the transaction log catching fire from a long running, massive delete, I wrote the following T-SQL to chunk through the rows that needed to be deleted in…
One of the benefits available to us when using SQL Server Availability Groups is that we can offload read activity to a secondary replica. This can be useful if we need to run reports against our OLTP databases. Instead of this taking up valuable resources on the primary instance we can make use of the…
Well folks, it’s Wednesday here in the UK, which means I’m a day late to get my blog post in for T-SQL Tuesday. However, if I was in Hawaii it would be still Tuesday so let’s go for it… I used a handy short script this morning and I figured it was worth a quick,…
It’s T-SQL Tuesday time and I’ve finally managed to put some words into a blog post again. It’s been a few months since I’ve posted anything on my blog, things have been busy, and my motivation has been a little lacking. However, this topic has inspired me to try and pull something together. Thanks to…
Well folks, after starting the year off on a strong foot it’s been a while since I’ve published any blog posts. Hope you didn’t miss me too much, but I’m back now and I’ve got a useful dbatools snippet for you today. Last week at the day job I had a situation where I needed…
This is now the third post in a series on Azure tags. You can read the other two posts here to get up to speed with where we’ve been, however that isn’t required for this post . Keeping track of Azure resources with tags – Part 1 Keeping track of Azure resources with tags –…
Last week, in Part 1, we talked about how to easily keep track of our resources with tags. There are many strategies for tagging your resources but I specifically focused on adding a ‘dateCreated’ tag so we could see when resources were created – since this isn’t available by default. During that post we identified…
I’ve been working on some Azure exams recently, and I personally learn best by fiddling with things. The Microsoft learn content is excellent, and I’d highly recommend that for any of the Azure exams I’ve taken so far. However, I also like to build things myself and experiment a little with all the available options.…