(Bob Pusateri) When backing up a database or transaction log, SQL Server needs to know two basic things:

(Omid Afzalalghom) PowerShell is an ideal tool for doing health checks of a collection of SQL Server instances, and there are several examples around, but few acknowledge the fact that individual DBAs have their own priorities for tests, and need something easily changed to suit circumstances.

(Pinal Dave) Sometimes the strangest of questions come from unusual places. This blogging journey is all about revisiting the basics. I have always felt getting some of these basic questions can make us learn even more and look into the internals of how products work.

(Marios Philippopoulos) Unchecked SQL Server database growth can hurt the bottom line of organizations in the form of poor application performance and increased infrastructure costs. Yet data-growth monitoring is often an afterthought in the day-to-day operations for SQL Server DBAs.

(Pinal Dave) SQL Server clustering is one of the oldest and most used techniques when it comes to developing a highly available configuration. Though this has been used by many for years, there are nuances that comes up once in a while if you are a junior DBA that you would like to validate your und

(Denny Cherry) I hear that argument all the time from software developers at clients when I tell them that we need to create indexes. This is usually followed up by “If we add indexes it will slow down the INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements.”

(Manvendra Singh) While launching the database property page of a database in SQL Server Management Studio, I received this error: Invalid object name ‘master.dbo.spt_values’. What does this mean? How did this error occur? How can I fix this error? In this tip we will look at a workaround to fix thi

(Edward Elliott) SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) provides, via the DacPac, interesting support for verifying not only those references within the database, but also those to other databases even if they are on other servers. Although it is adds an extra level of complexity to deployments, it can incr

(Greg Larsen) In my last article (Exploration of SQL Server 2016 Always Encrypted – Part 1) I discussed how to setup and use the new SQL Server 2016 Always Encrypted feature, and the problem I had with restricting access from Database Administrators. In this article I will expand my exploration of

(Ed Elliott) I have released another tool as part of the ssdt dev pack, what this does is create tSQLt classes and stub tests. If you open a stored procedure in ssdt and then do “Tools–> SSDT Dev Pack–> Create tSQLt Class” or you can create a keyboard mapping in “tools->options->keyboard”, what I