So tell me if this is a fantasy or a reality about restore backups: You are on a beach, sipping on your cocktail and looking at the sea when you get a frantic call from your boss, “One of the junior DBAs has just deleted all of the data from a critical database”. You say “Hold on”, switch to a browser on your smartphone, go to your dashboard on SqlBak.com and click a Restore button on your latest transaction log backup. In a few seconds, you get back to your boss and say: “I have fixed it”. Your boss is stunned, thinking you are a magician and makes a note to give you a raise and a bonus while you continue enjoying the beach…
SQL SERVER – COLUMNSTORE and COLUMNSTORE_ARCHIVE data compression
In earlier blogs on “Fundamentals of Columnstore Index”, I took a simple approach on taking a tour of how to create a simple Columnstore index. Having said that, SQL Server 2014 supports columnstore and columnstore archival compression for columnstore tables and indexes. Columnstore tables and indexes are always stored with…
Read MoreSQL SERVER – Script to Find Strings with Same Characters
One of my blog followers asked me if it is possible to check whether all the characters of a column value is same. For example if there are values like KKK and KKT, the value KKK should be the output as all characters are same. There is a method without…
Read MoreSQL SERVER – Finding Top Offenders in SQL Server 2012 – Notes from the Field #068
[Note from Pinal]: This is a 68th episode of Notes from the Fields series. Performance tuning gets easier with SQL Server 2012. For the first time, you can capture a workload and find your top offenders inside of Management Studio without having to write a single line of T-SQL or…
Read MoreSQL SERVER – Notes and Observations on ReadOnly Databases in SQL Server
In the past couple of weeks, I have written few blogs that revolve around utilizing “readonly” databases. It was fun working on this special case scenario that I had stumbled upon an interesting set of questions from my blog readers. These were not clearly called out in my previous blogs,…
Read MoreSQL SERVER – Cloud Based Data Integration Made Easy – A Real World Scenario
If you are a DBA, once in a while, you will have a situation where you end up with some tasks which will be boring and annoying. Trust me in my life, I often come across similar scenarios quite often. Here is one such tasks I came across a few days ago. Let us learn about cloud based data integration.



