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Category: Administration

Managing Resources via Azure Cloud Shell

Published 2026-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich isn’t afraid of the command line:

As a DBA or any data professional, it is becoming more valuable and vital to have a well rounded understanding of your data estate and environment. However, sometimes it can be a bit cumbersome, especially when connecting to Azure resources via PowerShell. You have to fumble with authentication, connection cmdlets and more, which can be a bit discouraging to use at times.

There are some interesting and useful tools to help circumvent that overhead and manage your Azure resources. Azure Cloud Shell is a great quick tool to use if you want to have a lightweight, and easily accessible way to help manage and administer your Azure resources.

Read on to see how you can connect and some of the things you can do with it. You also get your choice of bash versus PowerShell.

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Checking archive_mode on pgBackRest

Published 2026-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Stefan Fercot shares some advice:

A recent question on the community channels described a difficult situation: a standby had been promoted with archive_mode=off, and restarting the new primary was something the team wanted to avoid. Could they enable archiving on a downstream standby and take a pgBackRest backup from there instead?

Their attempt failed with archive_mode must be enabled, even with archive-mode-check=n. Removing the checks from pgBackRest’s source code allowed their proof of concept to succeed, but was that enough to trust the approach?

My recommendation was to return to a supported configuration, either through a restart or a controlled switchover. But I wanted to take a closer look and see whether archive-mode-check=n might allow the standby-based approach.

Read on for that answer, as well as some of the issues you might run into.

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Storage Engines in MySQL versus MariaDB

Published 2026-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis compares storage engines:

The big difference between MySQL and MariaDB largely revolves around database storage engines and anything related to them. In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the key differences between storage engines in MySQL and MariaDB, explain which is best for your use case, and detail how to change your database’s storage engine if necessary. 

Most of you will do just fine with InnoDB on either of the database management systems – however, those of you who are building something more wild and exotic might want to look specifically into MariaDB. 

Read on to learn more.

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Using the Azure Resiliency Agent

Published 2026-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens gives a copilot a spin:

And that isn’t limited to services like storage, web portals, user management, and data stuff. It’s also location, backups, and disaster recovery. But there’s a catch: you need to make sure this is configured. I always compare the cloud (Azure in my daily work) with a huge box of Lego. You have all the pieces and elements to make something cool, but you have to build it. Even when you automate it, you still need to think about what you want.

Now, before I continue my Azure Fundamentals training, let’s move on to what this post is about: resiliency. Or, how your environment is set up for disaster recovery.

Let’s use the Azure Copilot to guide the process, create the necessary resource and review the advice.

Click through to see how it works. Because it’s in preview right now, we don’t know how much it will cost later. But in the meantime, you can give it a try.

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Creating Alerts in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck turns on the Bat-signal:

We are building a new data platform with Microsoft Fabric and we’re using the warehouse for our “gold layer”. We don’t have real-time ingestion or analytic requirements, but we have a use case where we want to send an alert if a certain threshold is reached. Ideally, the alert is sent when a SQL query returns a result set.

Click through to see how that’s possible, as well as what kinds of rules, triggers, and conditions you can set.

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Setting Fabric Connection Properties with the ODBC Driver

Published 2026-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Adams digs into configuration settings:

Some SQL Server ingestion scenarios depend on connection-string properties that the built-in SQL Server connector in Data Factory for Microsoft Fabric doesn’t expose. If you need to route reads to an Availability Group secondary, connect reliably across a multi-subnet listener, or read columns protected by Always Encrypted, you’ve probably hit that wall. This post shows a supported way around it: use the ODBC connector together with an ODBC data source name (DSN) configured on an on-premises data gateway (OPDG). The example in this post uses Always Encrypted in a Copy job.

Click through to see some of the things you can set. These are standard SQL Server properties, so they can also work with normal SQL Server installations that are making use of Availability Groups and Always Encrypted.

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Wide Tables and Adding Columns

Published 2026-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Richard O’Riordan runs into an oddity:

We have a wide table in MS SQL Server (2019), say 150 columns. We want to add a new bit column at the end of this table with a default value of 0, at first look at this I would have thought, that’s not a big deal, this is a meta-data only change but it wasn’t, the entire table got re-written, so here are some scenarios I tested.

This is quite odd because my recollection is that, with a default constraint, SQL Server shouldn’t need to write anything to the table, and that’s how it’s looked in my testing. Remus Rusanu also had a nice post getting into the details of how this changed for SQL Server 2012. Maybe it’s an oddity from having so many columns on the table or records of a certain width or something?

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Tracking Online Index Rebuild Progress

Published 2026-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Rich Benner doesn’t take 0% for an answer:

Ever had a situation where you’re rebuilding a large index but when you check sp_whoisactive, you see 0% complete … and you know the system is just lying to you?

We recently had a scenario where we were rebuilding a large index for a customer over a long weekend. We were monitoring closely, as this has caused production issues in the past. After 2.5 hours, we did not see any progress on the rebuild.

Read on to see what you can use to estimate the progress.

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The Importance of Application Names

Published 2026-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar explains how powerful application names can be:

When you run monitoring queries like sp_BlitzWho and sp_WhoIsActive, you wanna see the program names that are running the queries. It’s super useful when you’ve got multiple apps running on the same servers, or when you’ve got apps scattered across end user computers.

If you don’t set the program names, you’ll either end up with empty strings, or your dev tool’s default name, like Core .Net SqlClient Data Provider, which doesn’t tell you jack.

And, once you do have application names established for everything, you can also set up Resource Governor to use those application names for the purpose of routing to Resource Governor pools.

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To Make a DBA

Published 2026-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword tells his origin story:

I enjoy a good war story.

But no, this isn’t the time Azure blindsided me, when service accounts were locked, or when I left a transaction open and halted a production system (easily fixed by closing SSMS 😅). Mine is a pivotal personal moment.

Andy humbly leaves out the part where he was hand-to-hand kung fu fighting a series of ninjas while doing all of this, but you can just assume that in there.

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