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Category: Administration

Things to Watch with Contained Availability Groups

Published 2026-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse keeps one eye on things:

Contained availability groups solve some real operational problems, especially around logins, jobs, permissions, and supporting metadata. They can reduce drift between replicas and make failover cleaner.

That does not mean they are magic.

Like most SQL Server features, contained availability groups come with details that matter. The feature can absolutely help, but it needs to be designed, tested, and operated with the right expectations.

Click through for several things you should consider before jumping into deploying contained AGs.

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Jobs and Security Objects in Contained Availability Groups

Published 2026-06-15 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse moves some assets between availability group replicas:

In the first post, I introduced contained availability groups and how they bring contained versions of master and msdb along with the Availability Group. That matters because many applications depend on more than just user databases.

Two of the biggest wins are SQL Agent jobs and security objects.

Click through to see how they work.

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Deprecated SQL Server Features since 2016

Published 2026-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci has a list:

If you’re planning on upgrading from SQL Server 2016 to the current version of SQL Server 2025, it would be helpful to note some of the features from versions since 2016 that are no longer supported. By that I’m talking about those things classified as “deprecated” (no longer supported) or “discontinued” (removed from the product). Let’s take a look at these features and say our goodbyes, organized by versions.

There’s not a lot on here that would affect most companies. Though to one of Jeff’s points in the article, I actually have seen a company use lightweight pooling, mostly because they didn’t know what it did and saw the bit about how it could improve performance. I came in and flipped that switch off for them. That was the kind of feature that likely benefited one or two large customers 30 years ago or so and it just hung around in the product due to inertia.

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Thoughts on a Cloudless World

Published 2026-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Donnelly has some tongue-in-cheek responses:

There are some serious angles to this topic, and I have had conversations with people at conferences who are doing a remigration from the cloud, but it feels like the exception not the rule. It is interesting to think about. I spent most of my career working with on-prem SQL Server, but there was a period of about 10 years (the consulting years) where I didn’t touch anything that wasn’t in the cloud. The past several years have been working in a hybrid environment, but most of the work has been moving things to Azure and Fabric. Koen has some prompts for what our blog posts could be about, but rather than dive deep into any one thing I’m going to go with the blog writer’s best friend – a top 10 list.

The funny thing is, in my time as an on-premises DBA, I never dealt with hardware and didn’t have access to the server room.

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Skills for Cloud-to-On-Prem Migration

Published 2026-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens focuses on a set of skills:

This month, Koen Verbeeck invites the blogging community to write about their thoughts on returning to on-premises. What could be struggles, things we have to re-learn, etcetera.

When I read the invite, it immediately sparked inspiration, because there are increasing rumours around cloud exits. People musing about ‘what if’. Some clients reference these questions, but so far no one has directly asked me one with the intent of moving forward with it.

Click through for Reitse’s thoughts.

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The Pain of Moving Indexes between Filegroups

Published 2026-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling explains a process:

At some point you’re going to want to move some indexes to a new filegroup. Maybe you’re separating data across storage, maybe you’re cleaning up after someone who put everything on PRIMARY and walked away, maybe you’ve got your reasons and they’re none of my business.

Whatever the cause, you’d think this would be a solved problem in a database that’s been around since the Clinton administration.

It is not.

Some days, I’m convinced that the only way to win is not to play at all. Erik explaining how to migrate LOB data across filegroups fits that bill perfectly.

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What pg_stat_statements Cannot Do

Published 2026-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Radim Marek enumerates a list:

Part one made the core case: pg_stat_statements counts, it doesn’t record. It walked through how the queryid jumble fragments one logical query into many rows, how the first-seen text freezes your per-request tags, and how the averages bury the p99 that actually pages you. All of that was about data the extension has and distorts.

This part is about the rest: the entries it silently throws away, the query text that can vanish all at once, the plans and replicas it never records, and the knobs that bite. It ends where part one started, with the question the whole investigation was really about: is this the query store Postgres is missing, or just the floor you’d build one on?

Click through for those limitations.

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Recovering Deleted Items in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens hits the recycle bin:

Let’s be honest: how many times have you accidentally deleted something? Either on your laptop, in a database or in a SaaS product.
It happens. We’re all humans (unless you allow agents to do all your work for you), and mistakes happen.

Until recently, when you deleted an item in Fabric, it was gone. Poof. Done. No grace period.

And that was a bit scary, to be honest, but now we have a new option to help us recover from oopsies!

The answer to Reitse’s question is “far too often for me to want to admit out loud.”

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Tips for a Terabyte-Sized Database

Published 2026-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar recommends some actions:

You were minding your own business, and all of a sudden it happened.

You glanced at file sizes one day, and your eyes got big. The numbers got a little large while you weren’t looking. This is a great time to stop and think about a few changes to the way you’re managing this database.

These are some good recommendations on the whole. 1TB isn’t a magic number, but it’s a pretty decent dividing line.

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Recovering from a Full Transaction Log File

Published 2026-05-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci sneaks in a fix:

We received an emergency call from a client that noted that their SQL Server instances was unresponsive. (This was an Amazon RDS instance, although that didn’t play much into the ultimate root cause.) The client had some technical staff already looking at the issue, and when we joined the call we were informed that the transaction log for their main production database was completely full, and all transactional activity in the database had stopped.

Read on to see how Jeff and team were able to fix it.

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