Administration – Page 2

Using the Azure Resiliency Agent

Published 2026-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

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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DBAs as Cost Centers

Published 2026-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd lays out the bitter truth:

That has been the problem for as long as there have been database administrators, and I don’t think we’ve ever really solved it.

Here’s what I mean. A DBA doing the job properly produces nothing you can see. The environment is up. The queries return. Nobody rings anybody at two in the morning. And because nothing appears to be happening, the people looking after it start to look like a line of cost with nothing attached to it.

In the traditional sense of how businesses think about this, they’re right. Nothing a DBA does makes money. What a DBA does is save money, which is a much harder thing to put in front of a board.

Warwick’s post moves in the direction of managed services. I’d move in the direction of understanding and vocalizing the benefits you bring to the table as a DBA.

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When Ints Overflow

Published 2026-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand hits an outage in both directions:

The Stack Overflow database has a long lineage, and a lot more warts than what’s exposed in Stack Exchange Data Explorer (SEDE). Many of the core tables were created a decade before I joined the staff in 2021, and they grew far larger than could have been envisioned back then.

One of those tables is UserHistory. This table uses an identity column as the clustered index and primary key, and records all kinds of information about each user’s activity on the site. From changing your profile picture, to earning a new privilege, to changing a preference, to something as simple as logging in or out. Each event generates at least one new row in UserHistory. At peak popularity, this table would grow quite quickly and, as the application became more complex, more and more categories of activity and state would get written there.

Click through for the story of an outage, and then another outage with a very similar shape.

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Dealing with Outages

Published 2026-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Taylor tells a pair of stories:

It was a normal day at the start, checking on the servers, responding to email, then all of a sudden the office went dark and silent…we had just lost power!

Everyone started stirring and then getting up, checking that our phone system was on backup power, and someone called the power company to report it and get a status of when the power would be back on.

Extreme heat, smoke, and servers are not a great combination.

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Category: Administration