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Category: Tools

Monitoring Replication in Redgate Monitor

Published 2025-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shows off some functionality:

The monitoring capabilities in Redgate Monitor were originally fairly limited to a few counters from PerfMon. A few people had written custom metrics on sqlmonitormetrics.com that clients could use, but we’ve had customers asking for more native integrations.

We’ve done it. With version 14.2, we have added an estate view of your replication environment. In the Estate menu, there is a new entry for Replication Monitoring.

I had to check the documentation to see if merge replication was included, and it was. That’s usually the form that people avoid because it’s too hard to implement.

In practice, this doesn’t replace ReplMon or more detailed mechanisms for detailing system behavior, but it does at least provide the ability to alert if things are going wrong with the SQL Agent jobs. That probably catches about 60-70% of issues with replication, with the remaining 30-40% requiring some sort of time of flight indicator to see if data on the subscribers are keeping up to date with data on the publisher.

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Accessing REST APIs from SQL Server

Published 2025-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand calls an API:

If you’ve worked with SQL Server as long as I have, you’ve surely seen this type of request float to your inbox: “Can’t we just call {some API} from SQL Server?“

Setting aside the instinctive “no,” how have we actually handled this over the years? Are we any better off with the new solution offered in SQL Server 2025 (sys.sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint, already described in this tip by Hristo Hristov: Invoke REST API Endpoint from SQL Server 2025)?

Read on for a quick history and some thoughts on invoking REST APIs from Azure SQL Database.

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Reverse Engineering a Physical Model Diagram with Redgate Data Modeler

Published 2025-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones gives the new Regate acquisition a try:

I recently wrote about a logical diagram with Redgate Data Modeler. That was interesting, but creating all the objects is a pain. I decided to try creating a physical diagram from an existing database. This post looks at the experience.

Click through for Steve’s thoughts. I appreciate how he’s willing to call out the pain points that exist in the product today.

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Running SQL Server on KubeVirt

Published 2025-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski builds a virtual machine:

With all the changes that have happened with VMware since the Broadcom acquisition I have been asked more and more about alternatives for running SQL Server.

One of the options that has repeatedly cropped up is KubeVirt

KubeVirt provides the ability to run virtual machines in Kubernetes…so essentially could provide an option to “lift and shift” VMs from VMware to a Kubernetes cluster.

Read on to learn a bit more about KubeVirt, including how to set up a Windows-based virtual machine with it. Andrew does document some performance woes, so that’d be a big concern to work out the why behind this.

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Upgrading to SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff checks out a tool built into SSMS 22:

Starting with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22, the Hybrid & Migration Component delivers a streamlined experience for upgrade assessment and side-by-side migration. This replaces the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) that retired on July 16, 2025, consolidating assessment and migration into one tool. So what are the key capabilities:

Click through for those capabilities and a few tips on how to use it. I’m not sure how clean the upgrade process is to 2025 versus standalone installation. I’d imagine that, if you’re not using something like ML Services, it’s probably fine.

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Thoughts on Data Modeling

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones has a two-fer. First up, he asks an opinion question about data modeling:

Recently, I had a few questions on database modeling. One was posted in the SQL Server Central forums, and a customer asked about ERD tooling on the same day. This came shortly after Redgate acquired Vertabelo (now Redgate Data Modeler). This stood out to me as very rarely in the last few years have I found people consulting and updating a diagram while performing database development.

Second, he takes a peek at a tool Redgate purchased:

Redgate acquired a data modeling tool from Vertabelo recently and I wanted to explore how it works. This is a short look at this tool and how it might be useful in working with databases.

My experience with data modeling has been that only the really large companies did a lot of work with upfront data modeling and keeping logical models up to date. It’s still quite useful for data warehouses, and that’s where the people I know who do a lot of data modeling make their living. But I find it’s too much of a hassle in fast-paced environments, especially when I can keep most or all of the data model in my head and I’m the person managing it all.

Essentially, data models are useful to the extent that they’re approximately true. But because they quickly get out of sync with reality, they quickly go from “quite useful” to “dirty lies.”

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Running SQL Server in a Local Container via VSCode

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Eduardo Pivaral uses the MSSQL extension in Visual Studio Code:

You are a developer using SQL Server for your applications, and you need to quickly setup a local development environment. How can you make sure the environment is OS agnostic, so it can run on any operating system? Let’s see how we can quickly create a local container to run SQL Server using the VSCode MSSQL Extension.

Read on for the instructions. I still do the old-fashioned thing of opening up a terminal window and running docker commands, but this is pretty convenient.

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Running Data API Builder in an Azure Container Instance

Published 2025-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret deploys an API:

This is post two in my series about the Data API Builder (dab), the first post, Data API Builder, covers what dab is and how to test it locally against SQL Server in running in a container. This was great for testing, but now we want to start to productionise this, and the first step is to get it running somewhere other than my laptop.

There are several deployment options available, I recommend you review the Microsoft docs here: Deployment guidance for Data API builder.

ACI wouldn’t necessarily be my first choice for, well, much of anything. However, it is cheap and easy, so it has that going for it.

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Generating an Entity Diagram in a Fabric Eventhouse

Published 2025-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Guy Reginiano announces a new tool:

As your KQL database grows, tables gather data from several Eventstreams, functions connect different tables, update policies move and transform data, and materialized views quietly keep aggregated data up to date – all working together behind the scenes 

It’s powerful, but it can also be hard to see the full picture. 

That’s exactly why we built the Entity Diagram – to give you a simple, visual way to explore how everything in your database connects.

Click through to see how it works.

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“The Parameter is Incorrect” with Copy-DBACredential

Published 2025-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Corbett diagnoses a problem:

I was working with a client to do an upgrade/migration from SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2022, and this client assigns non-default ports to SQL Server.  As part of the process, I had to create a credential on one node and needed it on the other node, so I went to the handy Copy-DBACredential dbatools cmdlet, but it didn’t work.

Read on for the troubleshooting process and the ultimate issue.

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