Gregory Larsen

There may be a time when you want to turn off transparent data encryption on one of your TDE enabled databases.  One of these times might be if you want to send a copy of your database to someone else without having it encrypted.  Another reason might be you no longer need to have TDE […]

How many times have you had a programmer come to you and say they accidentally ran an adhoc UPDATE, INSERT, or DELETE statement against their database, and now they want you (the DBA) to restore their database to sometime prior to when they accidentally corrupted their DB?  If you have been a DBA for very […]

We all know that you should try to size tempdb appropriately, so it doesn’t need to autogrow shortly after starting up SQL Server.  It isn’t always easy to do this.  Therefore, when you first implement a new server and/or add new databases you should monitor the autogrowth events on tempdb.  By monitoring the autogrowth events […]

Every DBA needs to appropriately manage database growth.  No DBA wants an application to fail because the database is out of space.  A database can run out of space a number of different ways.  One of those ways is to set the MAXSIZE of a database.  When the database grows to the MAXSIZE the database […]

We all know indexes are important for improving your query performance, but to store and maintain indexes SQL Server requires disk space and compute resources.  If you have indexes that are not being used, they are costing you valuable resources and causing your update statements to run longer.  Those updates run longer because they have […]

Do all of your tables contain clustered indexes?  Some say every table should have a clustered index.  Others say it depends.  When databases are being designed and developed, your developers might have overlooked creating clustered indexes on some of your database tables.  Having a useful clustered index on your tables will improve the performance of […]

Do you have data load processes that drop indexes to optimize the load process?  Are you dropping those indexes in one step, then loading data into your table, only to recreate the indexes in a post data load step?  It is common practice to drop indexes and then create them to optimize the data load […]

When you are trying to tune a query, you can look at the query execution plan associated with the TSQL code.  By looking at the execution plan you can  determine which steps are used to resolve the query.  But what if you just want to find out what the query plans are for only the […]

Where do you go to find the last time SQL Server was started?  I’m guessing you might have gone to the ERRORLOG file and reviewed it to determine when SQL Server started.  That method will work.  But what if you programmatically want to script a way to identify when SQL Server was last started.  How […]

When using Transparent Data Encryption, you might wonder “What is the state of my transparent data encrypted database?”  There are many different states that a transparent data encrypted database might go through.  Those states go from not being encrypted to being completely encrypted, and a few others related to managing the encryption keys. You probably […]

Once you enable your database to be encrypted with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), the physical database files, and the database backups are encrypted.  If your database and database backup are encrypted, then how can you send the encrypted backup to a person outside your organization? The easiest way to share a TDE enabled database to […]

If you have a database backup of a Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled database, the database backup will contain encrypted data.   Because the database backup contains encrypted data you can’t just restore it to any instance.  You can only restore the database backup to an instance that contains the same certificate used to originally encrypt […]