Latest Blog Posts

The Power Of Proper Indexing

This image is an actual screen shot of one of our production SQL Server’s CPU usage, taken from our SQL Sentry monitoring system. Obviously this server was under some strain. Users were complaining that queries were taking 30+ seconds to run when they normally returned data in milliseconds. It eventually reached a point to where …

Yikes! Cannot recover the master database!

Recently, during patching for a 2019 SQL Server, the SQL services refused to start after the patching. It was throwing the following heart attack inducing error: Cannot recover the master database. SQL Server is unable to run. Restore master from a full backup, repair it, or rebuild it. This is not the first time I …

PowerShell: Compare Users’ AD Groups

When it comes to user logins and permissions in SQL Server, I typically prefer to use Active Directory groups. The problem with that is that you don’t always know what groups a given user is in. I recently had a case where I needed to compare the Active Directory Groups of 2 users and determine …

Upcoming IDERA Geek Sync – March 17th, 2021

Don’t miss my upcoming IDERA Geek Sync, How To Be The DBA When You Don’t Have A DBA, this Wednesday, March 17, 2021. This webinar is for the “Accidental DBA”: the developer, sysadmin, or other IT professional that got stuck managing SQL Servers because their company doesn’t have a Database Administrator. This session will show …