SQL Server Auditing and Recovery With ApexSQL Log 2016

ApexSQL Log is a powerful SQL Server transaction reader for forensic auditing and rollback of malicious and/or unintended changes for Microsoft SQL Server. It is an ideal cost solution for recovery, row changes and/or before-after auditing. ApexSQL Log uses technology which enables it to read online transaction log files or transaction log backup files in order to create auditing results including before and after views of the data as well as the full row history of all changes.

From the recovery standpoint, ApexSQL Log provides sophisticated undo/redo capabilities which enable it to create TSQL scripts which can be used to completely reverse or replay all or only selected transactions read from the online transaction log file and added transaction log backups.

Read More

Interview Question of the Week #057 – What is GO Statement in SQL SERVER?

GO is not a Transact-SQL statement; it is often used in T-SQL code. Go causes all statements from the beginning of the script or the last GO statement (whichever is closer) to be compiled into one execution plan and sent to the server independent of any other batches. SQL Server utilities interpret GO as a signal that they should send the current batch of Transact-SQL statements to an instance of SQL Server. The current batch of statements is composed of all statements entered since the last GO, or since the start of the ad hoc session or script if this is the first GO.

Read More

SQL SERVER InMemory OLTP: Understanding Optimistic Multi-Version Concurrency Concepts

InMemory is an awesome concept and I have been fortunate to learn about the same from my friends in the industry over blogs. It holds deep concepts and is sometimes tough to understand how the building blocks come together. I am not the only one doing the exploration, but a number of you also do and pass those learnings to me via your interesting questions. Thanks to each one of you who take a moment to ask me some of these questions that shake the fundamentals and make my understanding stronger. In the same lines, one of the readers wrote back to me after reading the MSDN on InMemory OLTP, what does the concepts of Optimistic multi-version concurrency really mean. On first thought, it looks simple, but the question was very loaded.

Read More

SQL SERVER – dbForge Object Search for SQL Server

SSMS is a nice tool for database developers. However, it is far from being ideal, and this is because some routine operations in SSMS are extremely inconvenient to perform. Let us learn about dbForge Object Search for SQL Server.

Very often, developers face the challenge of searching a database for all occurrences of an object, column, variable, or search simultaneously all the objects, in which a search value occurs. If you happen to solve a similar problem, then you must know that this problem is not the most trivial and Ctrl + F will not help here.

Read More

SQL SERVER 2016 – IF EXISTS Function on SQL Azure Databases and More

The experimentation of working with the next release of SQL Server is always fun and when I wrote the blog T-SQL Enhancement “Drop if Exists” clause, lesser did I know such capabilities are already existing with Azure SQL DB. When I was presenting at one of the local user groups, I told most of the capabilities come to Cloud first, get test and the very reason that it scales without problem on cloud gives one the confidence that it would work in our enterprise. One of the attendees asked, has all features first introduced to cloud only? Let us learn about IF EXISTS Function on SQL Azure Databases and More.

Read More

SQL SERVER – Script level upgrade for database ‘master’ failed because upgrade step ‘sqlagent100_msdb_upgrade.sql’

I do apply patches to my SQL instances as and when they are released by Microsoft. This is important because I always feel keeping the bits up-to-date is essential because I don’t want to get infected as I travel quite a bit. Since I play a lot with my SQL Server, there are more chances that things are going to break sooner than your production server. Here is one such incident. Let us learn about how to fix script level upgrade. 

Read More

SQL SERVER – FIX: Msg 4335, Level 16, State 1 – The specified STOPAT time is too early

While trying to prepare for a demo, I ran into some interesting error. When I searched for error about STOPAT on the internet, there were not many clear answers so I thought of sharing on my blog. Actually, my demo was all about point in time restore feature of SQL Server. I was trying something similar given in my earlier blog.

Read More