How Well Do You Know Your Microsoft High Availability Technologies?

Are you up to the challenge? Do you have what it takes to design a highly available SQL Server system? Feeling helpless and confused when dealing with Windows Server Failover Clustering  (WSFC) for your SQL Server databases? You’re not alone. I’ve heard the same thing from thousands of SQL Server administrators throughout my entire career. […]

The Traffic Light In Your Datacenter

How This One Simple Yet Very Important Concept Helped Me Understand What Windows Server Failover Clustering Is All About

You know how it feels like to stare at this for a very long time (I ended up having to wear eyeglasses because of it.) Better yet, try it. Just for 5 minutes straight without blinking. But staring at a computer monitor for a long time isn’t the real issue. It’s the confusion of trying to […]

An Underrated Feature: Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) with SQL Server Failover Clustered Instances

In a previous blog post, I talked about the benefits of using cluster shared volumes (CSVs) for your SQL Server 2014 and higher failover clustered instances (FCIs). It’s also interesting how SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master and Microsoft MVP Argenis Fernandez (blog | Twitter) responded to a Twitter post I shared about the blog post […]

SQL Server Professionals Shouldn’t Hate The Word “SALES”

There’s a reason why you’re a SQL Server professional – you love working with data. You signed up for a job that looks at SQL Server databases, optimize queries, build servers and create business intelligence (BI) solutions. Fixing corrupted data pages and making queries run from 10 minutes to a few seconds get you really excited. […]

How Your Data Looks Like On Disk with Dynamic Data Masking and Always Encrypted in SQL Server 2016

Since the introduction of the new security features in SQL Server 2016, one of the most common question I get asked is around the performance impacts of these new features. Whenever someone asks a question about security in relation to performance, I tell them how someone would secure their house or any valuable items: A house is like […]