SQL Server Premier Field Engineer Blog

This is a shared team blog of the SQL Server Premier Field Engineer team

Physical_Device_Name Not Updated On Restore

The Problem You restored a database on top of an existing database to refresh your development...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 02/25/2019

Automate Azure VM Storage

The Problem One of the best things about Azure, and the cloud in general, is we can automate most...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 02/25/2019

FileStream Backup and Restore

I have been asked to provide some information on best practice for SQL Server Backup and Restore...

Author: DayoBam Date: 10/05/2018

AlwaysOn Availability Groups unable to query against readable secondary replica database: Wait Type HADR_DATABASE_WAIT_FOR_TRANSITION_TO_VERSIONING

Recently a customer reported an interesting issue, while querying against recently added readable...

Author: Chirag Shah Date: 07/13/2018

Configure SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance on Azure Virtual Machines with MSDTC

Configure SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance If you are running a SQL Server Failover Cluster...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 07/05/2018

Domain Independent Cluster and Availability Group

What is a Domain Independent Cluster? Did you know that you can have a Windows cluster that is a...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 07/05/2018

Read-Scale Availability Group Setup

What is a Read-Scale Availability Group? A Read-Scale Availability Group is a Clusterless...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 07/05/2018

MSDTC Supported Configurations

The MSDTC Configuration Conundrum MSDTC configuration is not as straight forward as you might think....

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 07/05/2018

Migrating Symmetric Keys Between SQL 2016 and SQL 2017/Azure

There has been a recent discussion about migrating symmetric keys between instances and version of...

Author: Sean Gallardy Date: 06/08/2018

Monitoring Azure Analysis Services with Log Analytics and Power BI

How do you monitor Azure Analysis Services? How many users are connected and who are they? These are...

Author: Christopher M Schmidt Date: 04/02/2018

How to Upgrade an AG Cluster to Windows 2016

Starting in Windows Server 2012 R2 you now have a way to upgrade a cluster to Windows 2016.  The...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 12/08/2017

SQL Server 2017 Read-Scale Availability Groups

SQL Server 2017 was recently launched, having multiple new features. One of these included something...

Author: Sean Gallardy Date: 11/17/2017

Implementing Buffer Pool Extension

Buffer Pool Extension was released in SQL 2014 so it's not new.  It is also not advertised very...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 10/19/2017

Microsoft Excel, TLS & SQL Server – Important Considerations

Background As you may know, TLS 1.0 is being deprecated due to various known exploits and will no...

Author: Chris Thompson (MSFT) Date: 09/27/2017

Sync SQL Logins and Jobs

In this post I'll point you to some options to sync SQL logins and then I'll demo my favorite option...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 08/21/2017

Trace Flag 1117 Growth and Contention

In this video I talk about Trace Flag 1117 and how it was designed to help keep data file growth...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 07/18/2017

Query Store Questions From The Field

I have had several Query Store questions come in from customers lately.  Some of the questions...

Author: Ryan J. Adams Date: 07/17/2017

SQL Server Workgroup Cluster FCM Errors

Background One of the new features of SQL Server 2016 is the ability to use SQL Server with Failover...

Author: Sean Gallardy Date: 06/28/2017

SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - Triggers and Historical Data Tidbits

Hello again and welcome back to the series on Temporal Tables! Today we will take a look at two...

Author: Kevin Conan Date: 06/20/2017

Troubleshooting CDC enabling failure – Part 2

In previous blog, I discussed the CDC failure due to guest user disabled in MSDB. My customer also...

Author: Louis Li - MCSM Data Platform Date: 05/30/2017

Troubleshooting CDC enabling failure – Part 1

My customer had recently experienced 2 interesting CDC issues and I would like to share the...

Author: Louis Li - MCSM Data Platform Date: 05/17/2017

Login Failed for xxx – Who’s Keeps Trying to Connect to my Server?

I recently ran into an issue in which a machine was connecting to SQL and continuously generating a...

Author: Chris Thompson (MSFT) Date: 05/04/2017

SSISDB Reporting with Power BI

Back in 2012 when the project deployment model came out for SSIS, many questions were asked...

Author: Christopher M Schmidt Date: 04/18/2017

Quick Tip - Shift+Alt for multiple line edits

We've all been in the position where we are doing research and need to add commas or single quotes...

Author: Kevin Conan Date: 04/11/2017

SSIS: Capturing PerfMon Counters During Package Execution

While troubleshooting SSIS package performance, having the ability to view the performance monitor...

Author: Christopher M Schmidt Date: 03/15/2017

Split a file group into multiple data files

Periodically we are asked how to split an existing filegroup into multiple data files. The quick...

Author: Trayce Jordan Date: 03/03/2017

SQL Diagnostics Project Part 2 – Custom SQL Nexus Imports

Several years ago, I wrote a blog post as to how you can collect your own custom SQL data from a...

Author: TimChapman Date: 02/24/2017

Trouble shooting Availability Group Listener in Azure SQL VM

Last week, I have had one mystery challenge while creating Availability Group listener in Azure. We...

Author: Louis Li - MCSM Data Platform Date: 02/21/2017

SSIS: Setting the same variable in multiple projects in the catalog

Recently I was assisting a customer with a review of their SSIS implementation and one the security...

Author: Christopher M Schmidt Date: 02/14/2017

Increasing the Number of SQL Server Error Logs – My Automation Journey – Part 2

In my last post, I discussed how to increase the error logs through the GUI and explained the back...

Author: Chris Thompson (MSFT) Date: 02/09/2017

Azure RM: Configure a second Availability Group with a Listener using the External Load Balancer

In a previous post, we have reviewed Azure RM: How to create SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups...

Author: Carlos Reyes García Date: 01/31/2017

APS Blocked Partition Switch

In SQL Server, when you perform a partition switch, a schema lock is acquired briefly to do the...

Author: SQLGardner Date: 01/30/2017

The EXECUTE permission was denied on xp_msver

Recently after installing SQL Server and configuring SSIS for project deployment in a SQL Server...

Author: Christopher M Schmidt Date: 01/24/2017

SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - How do you drop a Temporal Table?

As we continue our journey with Temporal Tables, the next topic will be how do you drop them.  While...

Author: Kevin Conan Date: 01/19/2017

Incremental Statistics – My New Favorite Thing

So many new features get added with each release of SQL it is hard to use them all. Sometimes, I...

Author: SQLGardner Date: 01/17/2017

APS 2016 External Object Changes

APS customers who use Polybase and will be soon upgrading to APS 2016 from AU5 or prior should...

Author: SQLGardner Date: 01/11/2017

CREATE INDEX Monitoring Progress

One of the challenges for DBA's are to work on heavy load and critical systems where maintenance...

Author: Carlos Reyes García Date: 12/22/2016

SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - Can you change the schema?

I was recently asked if after you setup a Temporal Table, can you modify the schema?  It was a great...

Author: Kevin Conan Date: 12/21/2016

Recover database without LDF file

I recently came across a missing LDF file case that I would like to share some interesting findings....

Author: Louis Li - MCSM Data Platform Date: 11/16/2016

Tempdb misconfiguration when SQL Server fails to create a secondary data file

One of the tempdb best practices when you configure SQL Server is to create additional data files...

Author: Carlos Reyes García Date: 11/10/2016

Troubleshooting intermittent connection timeout

In this blog, we are going to take a deep dive into a connectivity issue my customer encountered a...

Author: Louis Li - MCSM Data Platform Date: 11/08/2016

SQL 2016 - Temporal Tables - What are they and how do you set one up?

What are Temporal Tables? This is the start of a series of posts about one of my favorite new...

Author: Kevin Conan Date: 11/01/2016

Increasing the Number of SQL Server Error Logs – My Automation Journey – Part 1

I recently ran into an issue (will describe it in a follow-up post) in which I needed to review SQL...

Author: Chris Thompson (MSFT) Date: 10/28/2016

Performing transaction log backups using AlwaysOn Availability Group read-only secondary replicas-Part2

Describe the log backup process on a ROSR This is the second post in a planned series of articles...

Author: Trayce Jordan Date: 10/19/2016

Performing Transaction Log Backups using AlwaysOn Availability Group Read-Only Secondary Replicas - Part 1

This is the first post in a planned series of articles relating to SQL Server Transaction Log...

Author: Trayce Jordan Date: 10/19/2016

Finding Which Connections Have Been Read Only Routed

This is a follow up to my first post Finding What Availability Group Listeners Applications Are...

Author: Sean Gallardy Date: 10/18/2016

Create a Quick and Easy Performance Baseline

In this blog post I am going to discuss a very little-known performance metric introduced in SQL...

Author: TimChapman Date: 10/11/2016

TCP Port Is Already In Use

It's 3 AM on a Saturday morning and you receive that dreaded phone call – "The SQL Server just had...

Author: Chris Thompson (MSFT) Date: 10/05/2016

SSIS version number is not valid error

In a previous blog post, I showed you how you can set a target server version for an SSIS project in...

Author: SQLGardner Date: 09/29/2016

SQL 2016 Backup Compression with TDE Enabled Databases

The Background Before SQL Server 2016, businesses had to choose between securing their databases...

Author: Kevin Conan Date: 09/27/2016

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