Posts Categorized: Best Practices

Hyper-V and SQL Server Best Practices: What We Wish You Knew

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Why does my SQL Server seem slower on Hyper-V than it should be?!”, this post might help. And if you asked me about Hyper-V ten years ago, I’d probably have laughed. Maybe even less than that. But here’s the thing: it scales, it works, and with the Broadcom/VMware “fun” squeezing … 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

A Simple SQL Server Security Checklist

This month I am providing a 12-point checklist of scripts to check your SQL server’s current security posture. Use these scripts to get an idea of where you are, so that you can make plans for the places you may want to go. The paradigms of least privilege and defense in depth are important to … Read more

A Simple SQL Server Health Checklist

Being part of a consulting team has given me experience with many environments, and part of the work I do every week is to check for the various best practices and monitor server health across over 20 environments. This post condenses the tools that can help and the configurations that are most likely to cause … Read more

SQL Server Patching Best Practices

It’s day four of the two weeks to a healthier SQL Server series. If I were making this ten-day plan even just three years ago, I would have had this lower on the list. With the security and compliance needs of the world today and the way Microsoft services SQL Server – it’s important to … Read more

Restoring SQL Server – Are you Ready?

It’s 5 AM on Wednesday. Your CIO has called your cell phone at home. “We need you to log in right now! Someone or something deleted all of the inventory. I tried to help out the team right before the inventory disappeared, and I was running some SQL commands I found and a couple of … Read more