Data: The Asset/Liability Paradox
December 2, 2025
This post is written by a human; all errors and omissions are the author’s responsibility. Data is not a cliché. We’ve all heard from technical vendors that “Data is the new oil”, and “Data is our strategic Asset”. While those statements have a ring of truth, they lull us into a false sense of security. They emphasize only the positive aspects of creating, obtaining, storing and … Read more
T-SQL Tuesday #193 – A Note to Your Past, and a Warning from Your Future
December 2, 2025
I last hosted T-SQL Tuesday back in 2010 (T-SQL Tuesday #4 IO), I guess it’s been a minute! This month, let’s get a little reflective/introspective. Call it an end-of-year wrap-up theme. We all have those moments where we look back and think, “I spent a lot of energy worrying about the wrong thing(s)…” After some … Read more
Troubleshooting SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance Weirdness
November 21, 2025
Case of the Week: Quick Summary Two of the four clients’ SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs) did not fail over to the secondary node. Context This is a SQL Server 2019 with four load-balanced FCI’s running on two physical servers with 64 CPUs, 4TB of memory, and a Pure Storage array on the backend. … Read more
SQL Server Vulnerability Alert: CVE-2025-59499
November 12, 2025
This isn’t in the SQL Server Regrets series of posts, but another great band from that era once started a song with, “Stop me, oh stop me… Stop me if you think that you’ve heart this one before… Stop me, oh oh oh , Stop me. Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this … Read more
SQL Server Case of the Week: FCI in AWS with SIOS Won’t Failover
November 7, 2025
Quick Summary We received an on-call call from a client who was attempting to run a failover from on a SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance to another but the failover wouldn’t move to the secondary. They tried things, were using the things we had taught them about failing over for their patching or for other … Read more
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 … Read more
Good, Clean, Fair: It’s Time for a Slow Data Movement
November 3, 2025
When you sit down at Rick Bayless’ Topolobampo restaurant, you aren’t rushed into a menu. Instead, you start on a narrated journey. You hear about Chef’s own experience of Mexico. You are told and can read about that journey. As you go on this vicarious journey, it’s brought to life before you with each thoughtfully … Read more
dbatools Command Failing: “The Parameter is Incorrect”
October 31, 2025
This week’s case of the week post comes from Jack Corbett. Quick Summary When attempting to use Copy-DBACredential in dbatools, I received the error “The parameter is incorrect,” yet other commands connecting to the same servers worked. Context I was working with a client to do an upgrade/migration from SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server … Read more
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 … Read more
To Kill a SPID or Not To Kill a SPID
October 24, 2025
Quick Summary We received an on-call call from a client who had noticed something was running slowly over the weekend and decided to issue a KILL command. The KILL command did what it does – it started the KILL/ROLLBACK process. They had done that once or twice before, they thought, and didn’t remember it taking … Read more