Your DBA Isn’t the Problem. Depending on One DBA Is.
August 6, 2026
Long before I was the founder of a managed services company doing SQL Server work (back when I would have laughed at you if you told me I would ever had a team), I was a DBA, and sometimes I was the lone DBA at a company… Having an amazing DBA, having reliable coverage, and
Hey Sysadmins & Integrators – Look Before You Jump Into the Next Virtualization Platform
August 5, 2026
The Broadcom acquisition of VMware pushed licensing costs up across the tech sector, forcing IT leaders and MSPs to explore alternative hypervisors. Alternatives like Proxmox, Hyper-V, Nutanix, HPE Morpheus or moving directly to cloud platforms like Azure are rapidly gaining traction as teams rush to eliminate the crazy spend Broadcom is looking for or their
7 Things to Check Before You Hire a Managed SQL Server DBA Service
August 4, 2026
I wrote a longer piece a while back on evaluating SQL Server managed service providers and a shorter one on Linked In with 3 questions I’d ask before hiring one. Both of those are more about who you’re trusting – and that’s really the most important thing to consider. This one’s more mechanical… the actual
It’s Still Not Your Emergency
August 4, 2026
A message hit our Teams “Lounge” channel where we talk about anything in life, sometimes work. One of our DBAs was worried about a client’s data – some rows that didn’t look the way they should look with a likely data issue, and a growing question about how far back the problem went hit her.
Welcome, Richie (and why we are hiring a Senior Dataveloper)
July 30, 2026
We have a great team at Straight Path already. But there are two hires where a bit of timing, opportunity, and all the right stuff at the right moment happened. Oddly, they both came from the same place. When we added Tara we were just talking about growing and on the fence of “do we
SQL Server 2016 – But still, it’s farewell…
July 20, 2026
This post is part of our series “SQL Server 2016 – The Final Countdown.” Welp, it’s all done. The final countdown came and went… SQL Server 2016 is as dead as the parrot purported to be pining the for the fjords. I mean actually, it’s a bit more like that parrot than you’d imagine. But
Before You Hire a Head of AI
March 20, 2026
I’ve told this story before, but it keeps applying to new things, so here we go again. A few years ago, we built a duplex. In-laws moving into the downstairs units, my office going upstairs. About a month out from moving in, I called the cable company to get service set up. Figured a couple
SQL Server Best Practices: A Practitioner’s Guide
March 17, 2026
Changelog: March 2026 – Initial publication This is a living document. Next up: SQL Server Best Practices are not Universal Aside from maybe autoshrink, not all SQL Server “best practices” are always applicable to all. But some are. And we find them misconfigured on almost every new server we touch. After 15 years of managing
VMware SQL Server Best Practices
March 16, 2026
Broadcom just published updated technical guidance for SQL Servers running on VMware, and it’s bundled with the VCF documentation, which includes vSphere. (You can get that 90-page PDF here.) VCF is the Broadcom bundled platform that includes vSphere, vSAN, and NSX. Below are some of the best practices we work with our clients’ sysadmins to
SQL Server Critical Security Patch Alert
March 12, 2026
I should just create a blog post template for these, it feels like every 1 to 3 months we have another critical one to share. But here we are again, just yesterday, Microsoft released a fix for CVE-2026-2162. This one can, ultimately, lead to anyone with a SQL login and the ingredients for the exploit