Background Whilst watching a Pluralsight training course by Paul Randal, on ‘Logging, Recovery and the Transaction log’, a particular snippet related to differential backups piqued my curiosity. Basically, does a differential backup only take backups of altered pages, within a database. The short answer is ‘yes’, but the detail is a little bit more interesting …
No. Well, that was easy – I should write more articles that succinctly. Although the real answer, is of course – it depends.
Background I have a series of articles lined up, which require showing details of the log file. Using fn_dblog can be a series of articles in itself, so I’m covering a few basic scenarios here first.
Using a synonym to move a table to another database, without changing any queries.
Introduction Binary Large Objects (BLOB) data can be a graphical image, a pdf document, a music file or any of a wide range of data types, which can generally be saved into a SQL Server database. As part of a series of investigations I’m currently performing within SQL Server, I have looked at how BLOB …
Introduction The Microsoft documentation tells us that the SessionId column, within ASPStateTempSessions, consists of the Session ID plus the App ID. Although accurate, the method used for this does not make it obvious.
Introduction In a previous article article, I wrote about how to find out where the SQL Server error log is located. That particular article was in case your server instance did not start and you needed more information. If your SQL Server instance is working, there is another way to find the location of the …
Background So, you have a multi-terabyte database and a SQL Server full backup. Just imagine that you do something that wrecks the data in one table (and of course, that has never happened), the only secure copy is within a backup file that will take several hours to restore and you don’t have the time …
Background Whilst reading up on the finer details of High Availability Groups (HA Groups) I have discovered that it can, under certain circumstances, use Snapshot Isolation Level and therefore, row versioning. This has implications with your monitoring and maintenance tasks.
Background Because one of the nodes in our AG was having Windows updates applied, it was necessary to suspend data movements for all databases involved in the AG, on that server. Upon my return (after the maintenance was completed) I was unable to connect to the server, with a message that didn’t really match the …
