A Simple SQL Server Security Checklist

This month I am providing a 12-point checklist of scripts to review your 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 remember … 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

DBA Questions To Ask Software Vendors

Questions for a DBA To Ask a Software Vendor

Do you buy software from independent software vendors? Does it run on SQL Server? Are you responsible for supporting that software? Here are some questions that you can ask a software vendor about the way they use SQL Server. It’s best to ask these questions before you are a customer, too; you’ll have a bit … Read more

Create a SQL Server Baseline with the PAL Tool

Calibrate your budget and resources with a good SQL Server baseline

When we do a SQL Server Health Assessment, we quickly dive into SQL Server performance and Windows/Physical/Virtual resource usage counters. During our kick off interview  we always ask if you have a SQL Server baseline from the past to compare. Usually the answer is no, unfortunately. Like monitoring and alerting, many of the tools vendors make automated baseline collection tools. Also like alerting, though, … Read more