As of July 13, SQL Server 2016 no longer has mainstream support. Your next steps as a DBA include understanding Microsoft's support model, knowing the risks of upgrading and then biting the upgrade bullet.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 07/20/2021
Microsoft has just added support for query hints to Azure SQL Database, giving database administrators a powerful tool to manage the performance of ISV application code. Here's how it works.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 06/15/2021
Elaborate backups might seem like a good idea at first, but they add unnecessary complexity to your recovery process. Here are some things to keep in mind to make backup and recovery as smooth as possible.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 05/19/2021
Storage and performance can be quite different in the cloud. It's important to choose the right VM size and configure your storage properly to keep SQL Server workloads running smoothly.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 04/14/2021
Microsoft announced a lot of Azure SQL news at Ignite this month, but few as critical to application development security than the public preview of Always Encrypted with secure enclaves. Here's how to get started with this new feature.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 03/15/2021
Knowing how to automate tasks in the cloud will make you a more productive DBA. Here are the key concepts to understand about cloud scripting and a rundown of the best tools for automating code in Azure.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 01/22/2021
Last week's AWS outage that broke the Internet showed how critical it is to build applications that can withstand transient failure. Here's what you need to know to design a resilient cloud app (and it doesn't involve multicloud).
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 12/02/2020
Database protection goes far beyond backups; ensuring the quality and consistency of those backups is equally important. Here are the maintenance tasks that will make sure your databases stay in top shape.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 11/16/2020
Ignite 2020 saw the public preview of Azure Arc enabled data services, the latest step in Microsoft's bid to demystify multicloud. Principal program manager Travis Wright explains how it works.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 09/29/2020
In the second part of this series, Joey describes the methods that Microsoft uses to manage code rollouts, and how it detects hardware and software problems on Azure SQL.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 09/10/2020
Microsoft promises 99.995 percent uptime for the Azure SQL platform, which is incredible. In the first of a two-part series, Joey takes an close look at the infrastructure that supports high availability in Azure database services.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 09/08/2020
First introduced in SQL Server 2012, columnstore indexes can give you major performance gains -- provided you have the right workloads. Here's how columnstore indexes work and what types of data work best with them.
- By Joey D'Antoni
- 07/22/2020