UPDATE Aug 2024: With SQL2022, things have changed and we're now able to backup directly to S3 without the need for third part tools. Check out how to do that here... Backup SQL Server to AWS S3 Bucket (2022 Update) I've been having a little play around with AWS recently and was looking at S3 (AWS'... Continue Reading →
Resend an email sent from SQL Server using TSQL
Sometimes emails from SQL Server go missing, especially when you share an inbox with colleagues. On most occasions it doesn't always matter as the job that generated the email can simply be re ran to produce the email once again, but what about those emails that contain time specific information? we cannot simple just kick... Continue Reading →
Convert a Positive Number To a Negative In SQL With a Spot of Bitwise Logic
Now this is something that I've seen asked a few times and it's always a question that gets a fair number of different answers. How do we go about converting a positive number to a negative, or the other way around? I'll give you my solution and it uses a little bit of bitwise logic.... Continue Reading →
Digitally Signing a Stored Procedure To Allow It To Run With Elevated Permissions
Have you ever had the need to give elevated permissions via a stored procedure above that what the user calling the procedure might have? Perhaps you've got a table in your database that contains top secret information and you only want that information to be accessed by via a proc, you're users are denied access... Continue Reading →
T-SQL Tuesday #101 – My day of Essential SQL Server tools.
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is brought to you by Jens Bestergaard - the subject is Essential SQL Server tools, the original invitation can be found here. Here is how my day of using SQL tools went: It all started at 00:00 this morning with planned maintenance, I was adding a bunch of Clustered indexes... Continue Reading →
Encrypting SQL Server Database Backups
We all go to great lengths to make sure that our databases are secure (or at least I really hope that we do), we make sure that only authorised users have access and then only to the databases and levels that they need. We're careful that all our passwords conform to crazy complexity rules. We're... Continue Reading →
‘Object Reference Not Set to an Instance of an Object’ When Failing Over an Availability Group Using SSMS <= 17.5
Here's a quickie that I've just stumbled across. I've just tried to initiate a manual failover of an availability group and received the following error. After a spot of head scratching and thinking that there was something wrong with my AG setup, it turns out that there's a bug in SSMS. I was running SSMS... Continue Reading →
TempDB Filling Up On Secondary Replicas
Have you ever had an issue where TempDB was filling up on your secondary replicas? Do those secondaries happen to be read only replicas? When I have an issue with tempdb filling up the first thing that I usually do is try to figure out exactly what the space has been allocated to. You can... Continue Reading →
TSQL Tuesday #100: A Look To The Future
So for this month's TSQL Tuesday, Adam Mechanic has asked us to take a look into the future and think about what things might look like when TSQL Tuesday #200 comes around (apparently that'll be June 2026). So I thought I'd have a little bit of fun with this by going all sci-fi on you,... Continue Reading →
What if it all grows out?!
The other day I got thinking about what would happen if all databases on a single instance grew out, every single one of them! but not just once, what if they all grew out three, four or fives times overnight - what would things look like? Well I know the likelihood may be slim but... Continue Reading →
