A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
A cyber-criminal on the run, a wingsuit jump between planes at 5,000 meters, and 24 million flight records to sift through. This is the most cinematic KDA case yet.
Click through for a rather extreme scenario and how Tom was able to solve it.
Leave a CommentJordan Boich administers a database in a distributed availability group:
I’ve seen a lot of great blog posts and content out there talking about Distributed Availability Groups (DAGs). However, I haven’t come across much of anything covering the actual administration of them. Especially for those choosing to use a DAG as their Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy. If you’re choosing to use a DAG for your DR, then you need to know how to perform basic administration. The goal of this post is to cover the gaps in knowledge out there, and cover the nuances of DAG administration as the methods and steps reveal nuances that normal Availability Groups do not necessarily present.
This post is going to cover how to remove and add a database from a Distributed Availability Group. Removing a database from an AG and having to add it back is a common maintenance or troubleshooting step that many DBAs face. But when it comes to DAGs there are some extra nuances and steps you have to keep in mind depending on if you’re working on the global primary AG or the forwarder.
Click through for the steps, as well as some of the pain points you might run into along the way.
Leave a CommentNiko Neugebauer concludes a series on in-memory OLTP:
Over the years, I have contributed with a reasonably big number of posts on the topic of In-Memory OLTP (aka Hekaton) and I did a couple of focused presentations on this wonderful feature as well. I love the idea, I love the path where the feature was going, and call me wrong* and overall I think that if the leadership team of Microsoft Data Platform understood the potential, it would have grown much bigger and more impactful.
Today I am writing the last post on Hekaton, for the foreseeable future. For me its journey has come to an end. The Odyssey has ended. With the arrival of SQL Server 2025, we have finally received a functionality of removing the In-Memory Filegroup from the database. The introduction of this functionality is closing the loop after 11 years since Hekaton introduction.
I agree with Niko. The promise was considerable but the actual implementation was frustrating, especially if you had cross-database queries. At the time this feature came out, the company I worked for could have made great use of it, except that a majority of queries we had used replicated lookup data that existed in a separate database. As a result, we were able to make good use of memory-optimized temp tables for table-valued parameters, but not much else.
Leave a CommentHugo Kornelis looks into one of the newest types of index available in SQL Server:
It’s time to continue the series on internals of storage structures. I already covered the more standard storage types in the parts about on-disk rowstore, columnstore indexes, memory-optimized storage, and memory-optimized columnstores, and in the last episode of this series I started to cover specialized storage structures by looking at XML indexes.
Microsoft introduced limited JSON support in SQL Server 2016. However, it took until SQL Server 2025 before the native json data type and JSON indexes were introduced. So let’s look at how these work under the cover.
Click through to learn more about how SQL Server stores the contents of a JSON index.
Leave a CommentVlad Drumea does some sleuthing:
In this post I dig through some data that Shodan provides for internet-exposed SQL Server instances, their versions and locations.
I occasionally check Shodan for SQL Server instances that are publicly exposed on the internet for anyone to poke at. I make a LinkedIn post about it (like this one) and then just leave it at that.
So, this time, I’ve decided to dig a bit more into that data and document it here.
Click through to see what Vlad was able to find.
Leave a CommentGarry Bargsley runs the numbers:
Today’s post comes from one of those real-world DBA situations where someone hands you a folder full of SQL Server backup files and asks what should be a simple question:
“How much disk space do we need to restore these?”
Simple question.
Not always a simple answer.
Click through for a script that calculates how much disk space you’d need to restore a given set of backups.
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