How to Back Up SQL Server to Azure Blob Storage

When you’re planning for disaster recovery, offsite backups in the cloud are an attractive option. SQL Server Management Studio makes it easy to back up to the cloud inside the GUI, and you can learn how in just 90 seconds.

Database maintenance progress

Often we need to know on which stage is a maintenance operation such as: backup, restore, check database. You can get this information using my script.

How Much Data Has Changed Since Your Last Full Backup

Have you ever wanted to know how many pages in your database have changed since the last full backup? If so, then you will be glad to hear that the SQL Server 2017 version of the DMV, sys.dm_db_file_spavce_usage, has a new column named modified_extent_page_count, which shows the number of pages that have changed since the last full backup.

Backup SQL Server Databases in Parallel with PowerShell

I have a need to decrease the time my SQL Server database backups are taking to run. I thought about trying to run multiple backups at the same time to see if that would work. I could have created multiple SQL Server Agent Jobs to run at the same time, but I wanted a more dynamic way to handle this, so I created a PowerShell script that allows processes to run in parallel.

Azure DWH part 19: Backup and Restore SSAS

In the part 18, we created a Cube based on the Azure Data Warehouse. In this new chapter, we will work with the cube, create backups and show some tips to restore.

Saving Master Keys

How to Read a Transaction Log Backup

The transaction log backup is stored in SQL Server proprietary format, just like the transaction log itself. Even though the transaction log backup is in a special format, Microsoft has provided us with the fn_dump_dblog() function to read transaction log backups. This function is undocumented, so you should use care when using this function in a production environment.

Filegroup Restoring and Join Elimination

This article is just a short follow up of previous article on filegroup restoring that describes one issue with join elimination optimization.

Configuring Backups Using Veritas Netbackup with AGs

A short description of our experience with Veritas Netbackup on MS SQL Server AG Groups. This article does not give a full description of the procedure for configuring netbackup but highlights a few pitfalls which we think some people will find very useful.

Protecting Encrypted Backups