Today I had a need to manually trigger and sustain a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) inside a Windows Server VM. The goal was to be able to trigger a BSOD so that I could work on the detection of powered on but failed VMs inside a server environment. All major hypervisors have this feature…
Year: 2015
You Have One Job
I’m sure most if not all of you are familiar with the meme “You had one job”. I was reminded of this meme this past Friday when I headed out to run an errand at lunch time. There were 3 guys standing in the middle lane of a busy intersection, 2 were road workers and…
Enabling IFI on Setup in SQL Server 2016
SQL Server 2016 has added a couple of nice new options to the setup experience. First they added the ability to have multiple tempdb files on install, a nice time saver for later. And now, with CTP 3.0 they have added the ability to enable IFI on install. What is IFI, and how do I…
BCP and Code Page Fun
Quick, what’s the fastest and easiest way to get data out of a SQL Server table? Time’s up. It’s BCP. If you aren’t familiar with BCP it is a command line utility to bulk copy data out of, and in to tables. It has been around for donkeys years (technical term), and while it doesn’t…
New Whitepaper: Deciding Between Merge and Peer-to-Peer Replication
Replication is still a major component of SQL Server today even with Availability Groups as an alternative to certain scenarios. Availability Groups does not allow you to have more than one writable version of the data at any given time. Replication is the only native component or feature in SQL Server that will allow you…
ISNULL & Data Length Handling
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Some folks are not fans of having NULL values in your data. I am not much of a fan myself, however sometimes (all the time) they are a reality in which we have to deal. When working with NULL there are lots of strange behaviors you have to be sure to…
Availability Groups & Reindexing
I’ve been working with AGs for the last year and have a couple of things as regards indexing that I thought would be good to share: Always sort in tempdb When you create, or rebuild an index you have the ability to have the index perform the sort of the data inside of tempdb. This…
Availability Group WSFC Failovers During VM Movement
If you experience a WSFC failover during a VMware vMotion / Hyper-V Live Migration with your virtualized SQL Servers when using Availability Groups, you might have server and/or networking hardware that takes a bit longer than usual to handle the network port failover. This can lead to short unexpected outages in your application during the…
Patching Master Data Services
I recently installed my first deployment of Master Data Services (MDS). I installed the SQL Server 2014 (Enterprise Edition) MDS front-end on a new server with the intent to use an existing SQL Server 2014 (Enterprise Edition) database engine for the back-end. Unsurprisingly, I ran into some issues, and as luck would have it, they…
FusionIO and the Go Faster Button
Nobody has ever said that FusionIO cards were slow (because they aren’t). Especially if you compare their performance to regular spinning media, or high performance SANs. After all, no SAN will allow you to measure storage write latency in microseconds. Anyone that has had their database reside on a FusionIO card has had nothing but…