Bizarre Love Triangle (Sysadmins, AV tools and DBAs)

“Every time I think of you, I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue…” – If your SQL Servers (and especially your SQL Server Availability Groups and Failover Cluster instances) could speak – that’s what they’d say about the times your security and sysadmin teams deploy a new AV tool without talking to … Read more

Blue Monday: Not for Your SQL Servers!

Blue Monday: Not for Your SQL Servers

Monday morning: you’re back at work, but your SQL Server estate had a weekend from hell. Some companies find that out the hard way—every single Monday.It’s almost like SQL Server is taunting you, “How does it feel to treat me like you do?” I See a Ship in the Harbor (Do you watch for SQL … Read more

Regret (SQL Server Edition)

Maybe I’ve forgotten the name and the address of every patient I’ve helped throughout my years in EMS back when I was still involved, but there’s one thing I know: quite a few would say hindsight is 20/20. The older I get, the more I see how often this pattern repeats. Whether it was the … Read more

Managing Orphaned Users in SQL Server with sp_FindOrphanedUser

sp_FindOrphanedUser

Addressing orphaned users is an important piece of SQL Server security management. When left unchecked, you can accumulate an overwhelming number of users that exist in a database but do not have a correlating login in the master database, thus preventing access to the server or the database at all. There are dbatools PowerShell modules … Read more

Introducing sp_CheckBackup: Check Your SQL Server Backups for Recoverability Issues

SQL Server database backup tool for checking recoverability issues

Whether you are backing up your SQL Server databases with Ola Hallengren’s scripts, Maintenance Plans, or some third-party software, your backups are your lifeline for recovering your data in case of a disaster. So…are your databases recoverable? Do you know WHERE your most recent backups were written? Do you know WHEN they were written? Did … Read more