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Category: Administration

Microsoft Fabric Item Ownership Takeover

Published 2025-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Sakshi Jain has an announcement:

Today, when an item owner leaves the company, their credentials expire, or they lose access, many Fabric items cease to function. For example, Lakehouses and their SQL Endpoints become inoperative, Pipelines fail to execute due to user access errors. In these situations, enabling another user to assume ownership would ensure business continuity.

We are pleased to announce that Fabric users with the right permissions can now take ownership of Fabric items.

This is a big deal. for the same reason that we don’t want individual users to own databases in SQL Server, having individual users own objects in Fabric lakehouses and endpoints was always a risky play. At least now, there’s a way to handle when that person leaves the company.

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Security Baselines for Azure SQL Workloads

Published 2025-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen builds a baseline:

I’ve recently had to work a bit more with the Microsoft Defender and the vulnerability assessment in Azure. Following those efforts, it dawned to me that the topic of security baselines is sometimes slightly misunderstood. So, in this post, we’ll look into what a security baseline should cover (and what they probably shouldn’t).

But first things first. Security baselines are provided by the Microsoft Defender for Cloud service, which I always recommend enabling for Azure workloads (unless there’s a 3rd party solution for it already). If you don’t have anything of the sorts enabled for your databases and servers, I highly recommend you go and turn Defender on. Seriously. Do it now.

Read on to learn more about why having a security baseline is so important and where to draw the cut-off between security and functionality.

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Dropping a Role in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush drops a role:

You can’t just exec DROP ROLE your_role_name; if it’s granted perms or other roles are granted to it. I had to go fishing to find all the grants to revoke them. Note: if you are worried about re-granting later, you can always fiddle with this to output the grants for these perms as a rollback.

Read on for a few scripts to help out with finding what that role owns, revoking rights, and reassigning ownership.

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Thoughts on Cloud Monitoring Solutions

Published 2025-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen takes a look at built-in ways to monitor SQL Server databases in the three major cloud providers:

Monitoring SQL Server databases is one of the main responsibilities of DBAs, both in on-premises and on the public cloud platforms. Continuing from my previous post, where I reviewed the various options of SQL Server PaaS offerings from major hyperscalers, I’ll now focus on the monitoring solutions they provide.

While I always prefer commercial tools that come packed with features, it’s not the only way to go. Whether you’re using AWS, Azure, or GCP, each platform offers unique tools and features to help you keep an eye on your managed SQL Server database services.

Read on for information about what’s available in each.

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Repairing a SQL Server Instance

Published 2025-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea fixes an installation problem:

I’ve needed to run the repair process in the following cases:

  • An instance or some of its components become corrupted or missing after OS patching.
    One of the most common examples I’ve ran into is SQL Server Configuration Manager being gone from the machine.
    Not to be confused with database corruption.
  • A failed or cancelled SQL Server instance upgrade or patching.
  • SQL Server failing to uninstall.
    From what I’ve seen, this tends to be a side-effect of the first scenario in this list going undetected.

Read on to see what you need to have and how to perform the task.

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Understanding the SQL Server Version Store

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Haripriya Naidu digs into tempdb:

This article discusses when version store starts generating rows, when cleanup takes place, and how TempDB space gets occupied due to this activity.

I’ve hardly used PerfMon much in the past, nor was I a fan of it, just like many of you. But, when I used it a few times to determine how many data files needed to be added to TempDB while resolving contention, it helped me make a clear decision on the number of files needed. Since then, I’ve become a fan of PerfMon.
Although I don’t use it daily, I don’t hesitate to turn to it when I think it might help me understand things better.

Coming back to our topic of version store in this article, I resorted to PerfMon counters because visually watching the lines go up and down when an update is performed on a table helped me better understand how the version generation and cleanup works.

Click through for a demonstration of the process, including relevant PerfMon counters and the type of information you can get directly from SQL Server.

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CPU and Memory Configuration for MySQL

Published 2025-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chisom Kanu continues a series on MySQL:

In the first part of the series article, we introduced MySQL Shell as a tool for managing and optimizing MySQL configurations. We discussed how to install the Shell, connect to the MySQL server, and modify basic configuration parameters. Now, we’re into performance optimization, focusing specifically on memory and CPU configurations. These two components are important because they directly impact how efficiently your database processes queries, handles connections, and stores data in memory. In this article, we will look at techniques using MySQL Shell to help you optimize both memory and CPU usage to ensure smooth and fast database performance.

Read on to learn more.

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SELECT Queries Triggering INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE Audits in SQL Server

Published 2025-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy digs into an interesting problem:

Quite the interesting problem was brought to me by a friend, in that they had a database level audit setup and were having `select` queries trigger audits that the object had updates run on them. The question became, how is this possible as a select query doesn’t update anything. Let’s start with a quick setup and original output.

Read on for the solution, as well as a much more common place in which you’d find this issue.

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Point-in-Time Restoration for Azure SQL Managed Instances

Published 2025-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword points and clicks:

One of the benefits which comes with a Managed Instance is having backups taken care of for you. That also includes restores. Particularly useful is a one-click (ish) restore for a specific point in time.

Restoring a database is as easy as creating a new database, as its part of the same workflow.

Read on to see how it works, as well as one limitation around existing databases.

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