Database engineer with a passion for automation
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,…
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…
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.…
Another week and another useful dbatools snippet for you today. Last week at work I was given a folder of 1,500 scripts – each containing a create table statement. Can you imagine having to open each file in Management Studio to be able to execute it? Thank goodness we have PowerShell and dbatools on our…
I was working in my lab environment this weekend, playing with some SQL Servers that I had built with PowerShell DSC a while ago. I had installed SQL Server with mostly defaults, including not changing the engine and agent service accounts. For the blog post I thought I was going to write next, I wanted…
I was listening to a podcast last week about PowerShell, when one of the hosts mentioned having to ‘up arrow’ back through your history to find a command you wanted to rerun. This made me realise that I should write this quick post on using PSReadLine’s interactive search function. This tip is a serious time…
When granting permissions to SQL Server resources we have a few options. One option is to grant permissions to Active Directory groups instead of individual users. This has several benefits, for example, improved security over using SQL logins, and the ability to create a separation of duties when controlling database access. However, it does add…
Have you ever wanted to quickly backup/restore a database to the same instance to do some side by side testing? Perhaps to make some index changes or code changes, without actually changing the live copy of the database? Ideally you’d already have another environment for this sort of work, but even then sometimes it’s handy…