Introducing sp_CheckHealth: Check Your Overall SQL Server Health
August 19, 2026
Imagine you inherited a new SQL Server instance, or even several instances, and you need to perform a quick “sanity check” to see if anything is off. There are probably a hundred different things a Database Administrator (or someone who has to play the role of the DBA) would want to check to see to
Settings and configurations you should never touch in SQL Server
July 13, 2026
One of my favorite movies from my youth was Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. It’s about a young boy who gets accidentally caught up with some time-travelling thieves, who are being chased by forces of good and evil. And, without giving too much away, at the end of the movie the lead character shouts “Don’t touch
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
Temptation – When The Cloud Looks Like Heaven (but isn’t…)
October 21, 2025
A heaven? A gateway? A hope? Let’s continue the SQL Server Regrets series… The planned next post was about the cloud anyway, my reminder for this post was the really long day a lot of tech folks relying heavily on AWS experienced today… Another cloud-based DNS related outage/wave of interruptions. A heaven….. A hope?- Someone
Your Silent Face: The Illusion of the Safety of “Never Patching” Your SQL Servers.
July 10, 2025
No hearing, or breathing… No movement, no colors… Just silence… Sounds peaceful. Sounds serene. And in a world where entropy didn’t exist, it could even stay that way. That’s not our world, though. Our SQL Servers (in whatever flavor they exist) don’t live in utopia. They live in a world where bad actors are trying
Bizarre Love Triangle (Sysadmins, AV tools and DBAs)
March 25, 2025
“Every time I think of you, I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue…” – If your SQL Servers (and especially your SQL Server Availability Groups and Failover Cluster instances) could speak – that’s what they’d say about the times your security and sysadmin teams deploy a new AV tool without talking to
Blue Monday: Not for Your SQL Servers!
March 20, 2025
Monday morning: you’re back at work, but your SQL Server estate had a weekend from hell. Some companies find that out the hard way—every single Monday.It’s almost like SQL Server is taunting you, “How does it feel to treat me like you do?” I See a Ship in the Harbor (Do you watch for SQL