Infrastructure at your Service

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Nathan Courtine

Feb 16 2022
Nathan Courtine

Access Check Results entries too large, resulting in a memory pressure

By | Database Administration & Monitoring | No Comments

As part of a MSSQL consolidation project, with application servers located in one domain and the databases in another, we received an alert indicating that some databases were not available. After starting the investigation, we discovered that the Availability Group (AAG), to which these databases belong, was temporary taken in RESOLVING_NORMAL: The state of the local availability replica in availability group ‘xxxxxxxx has changed from ‘PRIMARY_NORMAL’ to ‘RESOLVING_NORMAL’. The state changed because the lease between…

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Feb 26 2021
Nathan Courtine

Automate CNOs and VCOs for SQL Server AAG

By | SQL Server | 2 Comments

During the installation of a new SQL Server environment in a Project, we wanted to automate the whole process deployment and configuration when installing a new SQL Server Always On Availability Group (AAG). This installation requires to prestage cluster computer objects in Active Directory Domain Services, called Cluster Name Objects (CNOs) and Virutal Computer Objects (VCOs). For more information on the prestage process, please read this Microsoft article. In this blog, we will see how…

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Mar 05 2020
Nathan Courtine

Restore S3 Object with AWSPOWERSHELL

By | Cloud | No Comments

AWS S3 offers different Storage Classes, allowing to optimize cost among others. For instance, some classes are used for archiving purposes: S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It means the storage cost is the lowest you can obtain, but your data is not available immediately and the access cost is increased. In the case of S3 archive classes, retrieving the data is not cost-effective because this is clearly not what it is aimed for….

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Dec 11 2018
Nathan Courtine

Transparent Data Encryption – Certificate in master database: is it really a good practice?

By | Database Administration & Monitoring | 6 Comments

As encryption solution in SQL Server, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) is simple and quick to set up. That’s why this is a common encryption mechanism. TDE encrypts data with a certificate at the page level, before SQL Server writes on the disk. It is supposed to protect your environment from some scenarios, where SQL Server files (backups or data) are stolen. By default the certificate used for encryption is stored in the master database. But…

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Nov 02 2017
Nathan Courtine

PASS SUMMIT 2017 – SQL Server Security

By | Database Administration & Monitoring | No Comments

Today is the first day of the PASS SUMMIT 2017 in Seattle (WA). The weather is cloudy and we have only 11°C… but where is the problem? Everything happens inside! (at the Convention Center). In this blog, I will make a summary of main attack vectors against MSSQL environments, based on Argenis FERANDEZ’s session called “Modern Security Attack Vectors Against SQL Server Environments”. METASPLOIT Metasploit is a penetration testing framework to exploit known security vulnerabilities….

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May 12 2017
Nathan Courtine

Personal road trip – PowerShell Conference EU 2017

By | Database Administration & Monitoring | No Comments

Welcome to PowerShell Conference EU 2017 Started on April, 5th at 9:00 AM, I was immersed in a wonderful and amazing Open Ceremony among light effects and an epic music. Indeed, using PowerShell is always an epic moment… Then, lights turned on and all the speakers stood up and come behind the scene. As you may see, they came from all around the worlds to bring us the best of PowerShell!   This Open Ceremony…

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Oct 21 2016
Nathan Courtine

Configure easily your Stretch Database

By | Database Administration & Monitoring | 2 Comments

In this blog, I will present you the new Stretch Database feature in SQL Server 2016. It couples your SQL Server On-Premises database with an Azure SQL Database, allowing to stretch data from one ore more tables to Azure Cloud. This mechanism offers to use low-cost hard drives available in Azure, instead of fast and expensive local solid state drives. Indeed SQL Database Server resources are solicited during data transfers and during remote queries (and…

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Oct 14 2016
Nathan Courtine

Manage Azure in PowerShell (RM)

By | Database Administration & Monitoring, Hardware & Storage, Operation systems | No Comments

Azure offers two deployment models for cloud components: Resource Manager (RM) and Classic deployment model. Newer and more easier to manage, Microsoft recommends to use the Resource Manager. Even if these two models can exist at the same time in Azure, they are different and managed differently: in PowerShell cmdlets are specific to RM. In order to be able to communicate with Azure from On-Premises in PowerShell, you need to download and install the Azure…

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Aug 17 2016
Nathan Courtine

Generate Azure VM with Resource Manager deployment in PowerShell

By | Database Administration & Monitoring, Hardware & Storage, Operation systems | No Comments

Recently, there is a new way to manage the Azure infrastructure with Resource Manager. It brings many advantages regarding the classic deployment. The differences between these two deployments will not be covered in this blog because it is not the initial goal, and it already exists a very good Microsoft topic on this subject. In this blog, we will generate a new Windows Azure Virtual Machine using Resource Manager deployment with PowerShell from On-Premise. Remember,…

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Apr 28 2016
Nathan Courtine

The (almost) same sample schema for all major relational databases (4) – MSSQL

By | Database Administration & Monitoring | No Comments

In previous posts, my colleague Daniel Westermann explained how to install the “Dell DVD Store Database Test Suite” into PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL. This time, this is my job to present you how to proceed with a SQL Server instance 😉 I will proceed this installation on SQL Server 2014 running under Windows Server 2012 R2. To be coherent with the other RDBMS examples, all the manipulation will be made on Windows core. Yes, it…

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