Distributed Availability Groups – Certificates, Crash Recovery, and Headaches (Case of the Week)
December 5, 2025
There are a ton of great resources out there teaching you how to build a Distributed Availability Group (DAG), but there aren’t many at all that help you troubleshoot them when they go bump. Fortunately for you (and unfortunately for me) I’ve had enough experience administering DAGs that I’d like to start to share the
Should a SQL Server DBA Know Windows Clustering?
November 5, 2025
Should a SQL Server DBA know how a Windows cluster works, and or how to create a Windows cluster, or troubleshoot a cluster? Or should we, as DBAs, stay in our lane? In some organizations, a line is drawn between what a DBA can and can’t do and the System Administrator (SA) has the Infrastructure
Curious Case of SQL Server Shutting Down Whenever a Job Runs.
October 17, 2025
This is a post in our new Case of the Week series — short write-ups from the real SQL Server issues our team of 17 SQL Server experts helps clients solve every day. Case of the Week: Quick Summary A client reported that their SQL Server service was “randomly shutting down”. They would restart SQL
SQL Server Partition Management Job Failure After Migration to Availability Group.
October 10, 2025
This is the first post in our new Case of the Week series — short write-ups from the real SQL Server issues our team of 17 SQL Server experts helps clients solve every day. Case of the Week: SQL Server Partition Job Failure after Migration from AWS FCI to AWS AG. Quick Summary A client
Make SQL Server Database Restores Easy With sp_DatabaseRestore
August 16, 2023
If you’ve read the Straight Path blog for any period of time, you’ve probably noticed more than a few posts about database backups. You may have also noticed we’re big fans of the Ola Hallengren Maintenance Solution for backups, which creates stored procedures and jobs to handle your regular backups. These scripts and jobs are
How to Setup a Standalone SSRS Server As Part of an Availability Group
August 9, 2023
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a useful tool that can be installed on a standalone server (a license is required), or it can be installed on an existing SQL Server host (this shares the existing license of SQL Server). This blog post covers how SSRS is installed on a standalone server and how to
How to Enable Transparent Data Encryption for Databases in Your Availability Group
May 23, 2023
Transparent data encryption is the built-in method for at-rest data encryption in SQL Server. Taking steps towards security has always been important, but it is becoming even more important every day as there is a looming cyber threat industry hungry for easy high-profit data. We should also remember that not all threats are from the