A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Vlad Drumea covers a pair of errors you might run into with mssql-tools version 18:
In this post I cover the 0A000086 and “command not found” errors that you might encounter with the new version of SQL Server command-line tools, namely sqlcmd and bcp, for Linux.
While the latest version of SQL Server command-line tools, based on Microsoft ODBC 18, brings improvements, it also brings some gotchas that can break your automations.
Read on to learn more about each.
Comments closedMika Sutinen shares a use case:
SQL Server on Linux has been an option for quite a while already, but I have to admit that personally, I have previously not been a very excited about that idea. This is mostly due to some complexities and limitations of SQL Server on Linux. However, the recent CrowdStrike incident made it quite obvious, that there’s a great use case for it. And that use case is Disaster Recovery.
The idea of having some operating system variety makes sense, though read the whole thing, as some companies will use components that SQL Server doesn’t offer for Linux.
And if you want a deep dive into using SQL Server on Linux, I’ll do a bit of self-promotion and reference my video series on the topic.
Comments closedInfant Arockiaraj gives people an idea of where to look:
Based on our extensive experience with customers using SQL on Linux, we have compiled a guide outlining fundamental troubleshooting steps and available tools to assist in resolving SQL on Linux issues. This guide aims to make it easier for SQL DBAs who have primarily worked on Windows operating systems over the years.
In this article, we will normalize three checks in Linux that we typically perform in Windows to start troubleshooting issues with SQL Server:
- System logs
- SQL Server logs
- Task Manager
Note: The screenshots in the below examples are taken from RHEL and Ubuntu machines, and while the Linux flavors are different, the commands are similar in both environments.
Click through to learn more about these steps and where you can find the files..
Comments closedAmit Khandelwal has good news for us:
We’re thrilled to share that adutil, the Active Directory Utility for SQL Server, is now officially supported on RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. If you’ve been waiting for this, your patience has paid off! Let’s dive into the details.
I had released a video on Active Directory in SQL Server on Linux that included a workaround to get adutil going on Ubuntu 22.04. I’m glad that part of the video is now obsolete.
Comments closedVlad Drumea is a trusting fellow:
This post covers a few ways to fix the SSL certificate error 1416F086 returned by sqlcmd on Linux when connecting to SQL Server.
If you’re looking for ways to fix the Windows equivalent of this error when using dbatools, check out this blog post.
It’s interesting how much controversy we’re seeing around tools like sqlcmd and (especially) SQL Server Management Studio defaulting to mandatory encryption. Having signed and valid certificates is a critical part of validating that this SQL Server is actually the one you think it is, and no intermediary attacker has swapped the certificate out with a phony one that allows the attacker to spy on your interactions.
I can understand people who are just messing around with SQL Server locally to experience pain on this, but the sheer number of actual companies—including companies using Central Management Servers, which implies having multiple SQL Server instances—with garbage-tier self-signed certificates is discouragingly high.
By the way, I’m aiming none of my rant at Vlad or this post. It’s just top-of-mind and this was as good a vehicle for rant delivery as I could find.
Comments closedVlad Drumea blames the intern:
This is pretty useful if you’ve inherited a SQL Server instance running on Linux, but the last person™ didn’t bother saving the sa password in your teams password manager vault.
Or, if you’re like me, and spin up test instances with random passwords for sa that you don’t bother saving anywhere.
Click through to see where you can find out how to reset the password, and then the actual mechanics of password reset.
Comments closedAravind Mahadevan shares information on a new bit of functionality:
We’re excited to announce that Extensible Key Management (EKM) using Azure Key Vault in SQL Server on Linux is now generally available from SQL Server 2022 CU12 onwards, which allows you to manage encryption keys outside of SQL Server using Azure Key Vaults.
In this blog post, we’ll explore how to leverage Azure Key Vault as an EKM provider for SQL Server on Linux.
Read on to see how to set this up.
Comments closedIn this video, we will build out two availability groups for SQL Server on Linux.
This one’s a pretty lengthy video, as I describe some of the mechanisms around availability groups and we build two AGs across three instances from scratch in SQL Server on Linux.
Comments closedIn this video, we will talk about Failover Cluster Instances in SQL Server on Linux.
This video stays in the academic realm because I don’t have an enterprise version of Linux (either RHEL or SLES) and don’t have a SAN or NAS, so I couldn’t actually show any of it off. Still, somehow I turned the utter lack of demo into almost a 20-minute video.
Comments closedIn this video, we harden our SQL Server instance in two ways: by using a firewall to limit inbound traffic, and by using a certificate to force encrypted connections to SQL Server.
This was a video I enjoyed creating. It also shows the progress of SQL Server security: go back to 2005 (pre-SP1) and even SQL authentication over TDS was unencrypted by default. They fixed it so that the authentication would use a self-signed cert but the data you’d get back from query results was unencrypted. Nowadays, encryption is easy (if you’re okay with a self-signed cert) and some future version of SQL Server will make it mandatory.
Comments closed