It's been forgotten about and neglected for few years but I've decided to dust off the cobwebs and revive our YouTube channel. Keep an eye on it, every new blog post will now also include a video demonstration as well as there being regular SQL news bulletins and other content. We'll also be going back... Continue Reading →
A while ago I was looking into some odd errors that were cropping up in an application, when I spotted that all the columns in a table were defined as VARCHAR(MAX). I'm sure that we've all seen instances of when that's been done before? When I mentioned to the developer that it's probably not the... Continue Reading →
The Distributed Availability Group Dashboard can be downloaded from our GitHub repo. https://github.com/SQLUndercover/UndercoverToolbox/blob/master/DAG%20Dashboard.pbix. This comes off of the back of my last post looking at using a distributed availability group (DAG) to help facilitate a SQL server migration. SQL Server Migration Using a Distributed Availability Group One thing that I mentioned in that post was that,... Continue Reading →
SQL Server migrations are a headache, ask anyone who's been through the pain of moving a reasonably large server and I'm sure they will agree. There are all sorts of methods out there for getting the data over to our new server. We can simply backup the databases and restore them to their new home.... Continue Reading →
This post comes off the back of my last, where I looked at issues caused by explicitly declaring a large number of values in an IN clause. The query processor ran out of internal resources and could not produce a query plan – When You’ve Managed to Confuse SQL With a Crazy IN Clause. My... Continue Reading →
Way back in the mists of time I wrote a post on how to backup SQL server to an S3 bucket using TNTDrive, https://sqlundercover.com/2018/06/18/backup-your-on-premise-sql-server-directly-to-an-aws-s3-bucket/. Back then, if we wanted to backup SQL to S3 we needed to use a third party tool. Since SQL 2022 things have changed and we've now got the option to... Continue Reading →
We've been hearing of a few people getting errors from the latest Undercover Catalogue, Powershell interrogation script. The issue seems to be happening when the scripts tries downloading automatic updates and online module definitions when running the script with older versions of Powershell. A new version of the script has now been uploaded to our... Continue Reading →
Are you struggling with a laggy redo and a build up in the redo queue on your readonly secondaries? Are you suffering with high PARALLEL_REDO_TRAN_TURN waits? Then this magic remedy could cure your ailments. There is a slight misconception with readonly AG replicas that the data should be 100% up to date with what's on... Continue Reading →
I recently received a complaint that Query Store for a particular database was turned off, which was strange as that particular database has seen quite a few performance issues and I know that I'd ensured Query Store was enabled in the past. No problem, I flicked the switch and Query Store was enabled again. Half... Continue Reading →
Your boss walks up to you one morning and says, "Hey, I wanna list of all of our databases and when they were last accessed". If you've got some sort of auditing switched on or a trace or xevent catching this sort of info you might be ok, but I'm betting you don't have any... Continue Reading →
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