At one of my clients, I've seen the benefits of using tools like Puppet to push configurations to servers. I've long tried to write idempotent configuration scripts for my servers. Those are scripts that can be run multiple times without changing the end result. They try to bring the server…
I've always had a love-hate relationship with linked servers. On one hand, they are very easy to use and query. On the other they can be a pain to configure, secure, and performance tune. I wrote about naming linked servers in 2011. After living with various schemes, I'm happy with…
I found the time to update ClearTrace to support Extended Events. You can download ClearTrace for Extended Events from my corporate site. A few notes about this build It's a very early release. Everything seems to work for me and it passes all the tests. Please report any issues in…
Lately I've been spending time writing GO (or GOLANG) applications. I'm a big fan of the language. Often what I write needs to run as a Windows service. I've found a few things you can do to make your life easier. Use a Shell There are three "shells"…
ELK (or Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana) is taking over one of my clients. And I have to admit it's a very handy tool. They are pushing all their logs into it and it's ver easy to search them. Fair warning: My ELK skills and knowledge are very rudimentary at this…
I have finally jumped on the Extended Events bandwagon. It was tough to pry Trace and Profiler from my cold, legacy hands! But I'm mostly there. I'm still working on a good way to hook up ClearTrace to these things. It might be as simple as requiring you to pull…
It's finally time to push another release of Is It SQL out the door. This has a few big features I've been working on. Backups First, it handles remote Availability Group backups properly. In an AG, you can run a backup on a secondary node. IsItSQL now finds backups on…
Today, through various snafus and situations, I found myself waiting a LONG time for a lock to clear up. Here's how I got an alert to pop up on my phone (an iPhone) when that stupid SPID finally rolled back. You'll need to have database mail configured and ready to…
I'd like to tell you this release has some great unifying theme. It doesn't. It's just a bunch of things I felt like fixing. But let's start with tags. That's what I originally wanted to focus on for this release. The first change is to separate out the user-tags from…
It's finally time to push Is It SQL 1.0.25 out the door. I sent it to the newsletter subscribers last week and we haven't discovered any problems yet. Before upgrading, please read the README in the zip file! Especially if you have custom connection strings and this is…