Let’s create a virtual machine in Azure that has an imaged copy of SQL Server on it. I want to do this because down the line I want to show how you can setup automated backups to a storage account based on an IaaS extension, when I do that I will most likely talk about the different backup options because there are many.
An amazing blog post by Microsoft describing the idea of hot patching the database engine in Azure SQL Database to allow for minimal downtime when applying patches to SQL Server. We know that it is one of the benefits of Azure SQL Database but now we get some insight into how it’s done.
Hopefully you know that SSMS is a separate install from the main SQL Server install. You can find the binaries from Microsoft (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms) Using SSMS version 18.2, whilst playing around with the options I noticed a dark theme was available, easy to say I got a little excited, then I didn’t.
I was generally reading about SQL Server and how things have changed since the days of just having it within a Windows Eco-system only. It then led me to a cool website, SQL Server development – build an app using SQL server where you can get to see the high-level requirements of starting to build a solution based on a wide variation of languages and operating systems. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/developer-get-started/
There are many combinations possible with SQL Server being the back-end database of choice.
While not specific to SQL Server 2019 (I was using this version to do some testing) I was struggling to find how to change the time period of analysis for the Query Store reports within SSMS.
Yes, a really nice new shiny feature where we have the ability to suspend and resume the encryption scan for TDE – Transparent Data Encryption which is available in SQL Server 2019. (Tested against the latest version CTP 2.4)
Another re-post of a video from last year, this time showing you an in-built protection of setting max server memory for your SQL Server. You can clearly see that if you enter a silly figure such as 50 MB, the minimum memory amount allowable for max server memory is 128 MB. You will see SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) change it to 128MB.
A quick video clip showing how to create a deadlock in SQL Server and find information about it.
I seem to be writing solely about Azure so to shake things up a bit I am going back to my “roots”. In SQL Server your differential backup is cumulative and NOT incremental and a differential will contain the data that has changed since the last full backup.
Let’s dig in using DBCC PAGE.
Sometimes I like to see and know what SQL server is doing under certain operations and recently I wrote an extended events script to see what sort of I/O patterns my query was doing (This is a fun post). The important event here is sqlserver.file_read_completed.
I clear cache and let the fun begin.
