Product articles
SQL Toolbelt

Database Delivery with Docker and SQL Change Automation

Phil Factor demonstrates how to integrate SQL Change Automation into containerized workflows, such as are typical of a microservices architecture. He shows how to automate database builds into a Linux SQL Server container running on Windows, and then backup the containerized database and restore it into dedicated containerized development copies for each developer and tester. Read more

A DBA’s Journey towards Database DevOps

John Morehouse describes how a quest to help solve his organization's "deployment bottleneck" led them to a place where they could both deliver application and database changes into the wild at a pace to satisfy customer demand, and achieve a better work-life balance for the team, both of which are well worth having. Read more

Monitoring SQL Server Performance: What’s Required?

A monitoring tool must provide us with an understanding of the often-complex performance patterns that databases exhibit when under load, so that we can predict how they will cope with expansion or increase in scale. It must also helps us spot the symptoms of stress and act before they become problems that affect the service, and understand better what was happening within a database when an intermittent problem started. Read more

Proactively monitor your SQL Server estate with SQL Monitor 9

Faris Hilmi introduces the new Estate pages in SQL Monitor 9, which provide estate-wide views of disk space usage, backups and other jobs, and application of recent SQL Server updates and patches. Using them, a team can review the overall health of all their servers and databases, identify potential issues before they escalate into real problems, and assign priorities, proactively. Read more

Monitoring SQL Server Security: What’s Required?

If we know how a database is likely to be attacked, we can arrange our lines of defense, and install the monitors required to detect any attempts. However, some types of attack are difficult to imagine, so we also need our monitoring tool to be adaptable, so that it can collect a more diffuse collection of metrics, and then help us determine the reason for any sudden change in the patterns of access . Read more