(Pinal Dave) Few days back my friend called me to know if there is any tool which can be used to get restart notification about SQL in their environment. I told that SQL Server can do it by itself with some configurations. He was happy and surprised to know that he need not spend any extra money.

(Dinesh Priyankara) As you know, some of the components such as Management Studio (SSMS) and Configuration Manager are shared components of SQL Server instances and they are upgraded when an in-place upgrade is performed. However, they are not supposed to get upgraded with Side-by-side upgrade unles

(Michael K. Campbell) Here’s a query that every DBA should have in their toolbox.

(Brady Upton) Maintenance Plans are very common in a SQL Server environment. They can be used for various things and sometimes makes life easier for a DBA to quickly create a plan for backups, index maintenance, or to run a quick integrity check. One feature that is often overlooked is the maintenan

(Nicolas Souquet) With the verly large amounts of data companies store today, databases are very likely to contain critical and confidential data, making database backups encryption an essential database engine feature. It is easily foreseeable that such feature will soon be required to pass accredi

(Richard Douglas) System databases are often neglected, part of this is due to Microsoft’s message of SQL Server will run and look after itself. In fairness it does to a certain extent (no, that’s not a pun), it’s configured out of the box not to be the fastest, but to be stable.

(Kenneth Fisher) I frequently see the default trace mentioned in answers to forum questions, blog posts, articles, even training sessions. My knowledge of it after 15+ years with SQL Server unfortunately minimal.

(Dinesh Priyankara) “As per MSDN, the maximum memory can be consumed by SQL Server is 8TB, Will SQL Server surely use 8TB if the box is configured with 8TB?”. This was a question raised by an enthusiast.

(Michael K. Campbell) In some ways, this post outlines a bit of what I’d call a poor man’s approach to getting copies of your backups off-box and to a secondary (or tertiary/etc.) location. And that’s because there are lots of great ways to do this in most cases, ranging from using the MIRROR TO cla

(Tim Smith) We’re looking to minimize ETL costs by importing as much data as possible using a automated system. A data provider sends us flat file data and we extract, analyze and report on these data. Due to our limited budget and time, how can we automate this?