microsoft sql

Migration to Windows Azure SQL Database:Step 4 and 5

Now that you've completed analyzing your current database, and worked through that list of items that won't work with Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD), it's

Oozie Ran Green and the Data Was Wrong: Making Hadoop Pipelines Observable

The Oozie coordinator showed green. Every action node in the workflow completed with status SUCCEEDED. The daily aggregation job had run, written its output to HDFS, and Oozie was happy. The output had zero rows. Nobody noticed for four days, because there was no alerting on output volume. The downstream

Schema Drift Is a Bug: How SSDT Changed My Release Process

Schema drift is when your production database has diverged from what your source control says it should be. This happens constantly in environments where developers can make direct schema changes in SSMS, where "emergency fixes" get applied to production and the plan to commit them later never materializes,

microsoft sql

Migration to Windows Azure SQL Database: Step 3b

Last time I walked you through how to see if your database will work with Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD) using the Migration Wizard on Codeplex. It's an easy

microsoft sql

Migration to Windows Azure SQL Database: Step 3

As promised we're going to dive into the details on how we would actually migrate the database from your on premise server to Windows Azure SQL Database. We're

Windows Azure

Migration to Windows Azure SQL Database: Step 2

Let's continue our discussion on what it takes to migrate a database from SQL Server classic to Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD). At this point in the

microsoft sql

Emergency Support

My system is down, what do I do? It's unfortunate, but sometimes a company has to experience a complete server failure before I'm invited to help. During these

microsoft sql

Disaster Recovery and High Availability Planning

How long could your company go if your database server simply stopped? Many of my clients have never even thought about this question. It's a question you need

Dacpacs and Desired State: Deploy What You Mean, Not What You Remember

A dacpac is a zip file. Inside it: your database schema compiled into a model, and optionally, your reference data. You pass it to SqlPackage.exe, point it at a target database, and SSDT figures out the delta and applies it. This is SSDT's deployment model, and it&

Running tSQLt in a Build Pipeline: Getting SQL Tests Out of SSMS

Running tSQLt tests in SSMS is fine when you're developing. But tests that only run when a developer remembers to run them aren't really protecting you. The goal is tests that run automatically on every code change — before the change gets merged, before it gets deployed,

The Raw Zone Is Non-Negotiable: Storing Messages Before Deserializing

I want to tell you about a pipeline I inherited. It consumed messages from a Kafka topic and wrote structured records directly into an analytics database — no intermediate storage, no raw landing. The producer was an application team in a different department that had, historically, not told anyone when they

Kafka Topics, Partitions, and Offsets: The Mental Model for SQL Developers

The first time most SQL developers look at Kafka documentation, they hit a wall around partitions. The concept exists in SQL Server too — table partitions, partition functions, partition schemes — but Kafka uses the word to mean something slightly different, and the difference matters when you are trying to figure out