Infrastructure at your Service
By one of our customer we use Avamar for the backup and restore solution. I was asked by this customer to find a solution to run Avamar backups for a group of databases on a specified instance. In fact, we currently try a database clone solution on some instances and clone’s databases must not be backed up, but the rest of the databases must be. After some discussions with my colleague I decided to use…
As a SQL Server DBA we have the habit to migrate databases from an instance to another one or to a new environment. But migrate a database from on-premise to the Azure Cloud is an operation that we don’t deal with every day. As a reminder, Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) which gives the ability to manage your databases directly from the Cloud with the performance of your choose, reliability, security and…
Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) which gives us the possibility to create application with a performant database without to take care of the relying infrastructure. Azure SQL Database is based on the latest stable version of Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine. We have the choose between 2 purchasing models: a vCore-based purchasing model and a DTU-based (Database Throughput Unit) purchasing model. 3 Deployment options possible: single database: has its own set of…
SQL Server Management Studio is a well know integrated environment used to manage SQL Server infrastructure. This new version 17.4 can support SQL Server from 2008 up to 2017. It enhances existing features like Showplan, XE Profiler (complete list here) but also add an interesting one which is the Vulnerability Assessment. Vulnerability Assessment will scan a database in order to help you to track security holes and deviations. Rules to define those deviations are based…
Last Friday I saw a very interesting session in Pass Summit 2017 about how to Bypass, or Ensure, SQL Server security by Matt Martin. Matt explained us how to bypass SQL Server security with the complicity of your SQL Server DBA. Msdb is the most powerful database to get stuff done: mail, jobs… so let’s have a look how to take the power within a SQL Server instance. Start a job under SQLAgentOperator role SQLAgentOperator…
Today starts the Pass Summit 2017 taking place in Seattle. After a small fly over the Ocean, more than 10 hours… yesterday, and a nice jet lag which avoid me to sleep later than 4AM this morning, I arrived to the Convention Center in Seattle where the Pass takes place. I start this first day by the session of Itzik Ben-Gan: T-SQL Tips and Tricks. As part of the session, Itzik spoke about batch processing…
Beginning of last week Microsoft announced the general availability of SQL Server 2017 for today, the second of October. In the same time, but in a more marketing side, Microsoft announced a SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux offer, more information here. It looked for me like the good time to do my first installation of SQL Server 2017 on Linux. My first concern was to download an ISO of the Red Hat Enterprise…
I wrote some months ago several blog posts about the new Container feature of Windows Server 2016. Here is the list: Windows Server 2016: Containers Windows Containers: Migration Windows Container: installation and utilization Today, I will install the Container feature, install Docker and deploy a container. First of all, I need to enable the Container and the Hyper-V feature, take care if you use VirtualBox because after having enable Hyper-V this won’t work anymore. Windows…
Last week, dbi services organized an event named “SQL Server 2016: what’s new?” in Lausanne, Basel and Zurich. I would take the opportunity to say again a big thank you to everyone which joined us. During my session some questions concerning the new functionality Dynamic Data Masking were asked. In fact data are masked for some roles and not for some others. Let’s try to clarify that. I will use the same script I used…
In my last blog post about SQL Server 2016 Always Encrypted, here, I showed how to use this new functionality but also that you have to separate the different execution context with an Application server, a database server and a security server to avoid that certificate will be available for all users and break the segregation. Let’s see how to build those environment. In my security server named SQL2016-2, I first create a Self-signed certificate…
