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
How to Choose a SQL Server Managed Service Provider
February 20, 2026
By Mike Walsh | February 20, 2026 When we talk to marketing folks, one piece of advice is to write a “top ten” list post and set us up as number 1, and then explain why our competition is okay but not as good as us. I’m not going to do that. Not because I don’t think
Hyper-V and SQL Server Best Practices: What We Wish You Knew
October 29, 2025
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
SQL Server Backups and the Illusion of Safety: Confusion
October 14, 2025
With the recent data center fire and missing government data in South Korea, it felt like a good time to continue with the SQL Server Regrets series of blog posts. We’ll talk about the confusion of thinking you are covered for recoverability – when you just aren’t. This “Regret” comes up far too often when
PowerShell Splatting 101: Clean Up Your Commands
September 17, 2025
Have you ever written a PowerShell command so long that it stretched across the screen? Or had to update a script and hunt through a long parameter list to change a single value? Splatting solves that problem by letting you pass multiple parameters to a command using a single variable. What Is Splatting? Splatting allows
Deploy SQL Server With This One Script (dbatools)
September 3, 2025
In this and the next two blog posts I will be bringing diverse dbatools commands into scripts that can handle a complete deployment, do a checkup of major health and configuration metrics, and do a true up of a pre-existing instance. This post will cover the complete deployment, which if you have been reading the
Save Time On SQL Server Installs With Install-DbaInstance (dbatoools)
August 11, 2025
As DBAs we install SQL Server for various reasons regularly. If you could save time for each installation for more critical tasks, would you? In this blog post, we will audit the dbatools command Install-Dbainstance. I will test, review, and evaluate the script based on a series of identical steps. Our goal is to provide
How to Quickly Load CSV Files Into SQL Server Using Import-DbaCsv (dbatools)
July 22, 2025
Most businesses are rotten with Excel sheets and CSV exports from various tools and as my mentor puts it “Excel is the world’s database”. The dbatools command Import-DbaCsv enables the quick load of CSV tables into SQL Server, which then opens up the world of fast transformation and use in other tools such as PowerBI,
How to Automatically Install SQL Server Service Packs and Cumulative Updates with Update-DbaInstance (dbatools)
July 17, 2025
Keeping your SQL Server instance up to date with the latest service packs and cumulative updates is one of the key components of SQL Server security. In this blog post, we will audit the dbatools command Update-DbaInstance, which can save you hours every month and help keep your environment more secure. I will test, review,