I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at SQLBits! I had the absolute pleasure of speaking at SQLBits in the past, both in person and virtual, and experienced first hand how great this event is and cannot wait to get back and speak again (in person)! And this year, I have several sessions with some of my best friends on our data community!!! One on building and deploying container based applications in Kubernetes and the other on deploying SQL Server in Kubernetes

My updated course “Configuring and Managing Kubernetes Storage and Scheduling” is now available on Pluralsight here! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer here, or if you’re going to dive right in, check it out here! This course teaches you how to decouple state and configuration from your Pod’s lifecycle using persistent storage and configuration as data and how to schedule Pods to Nodes in your Kubernetes cluster.

This blog post shows you how NTFS stores data, what the NTFS Allocation Unit means, and how SQL Server performs IOs of variable size. How NTFS Stores Data on Disk A Master File Table (MFT) is the data structure that describes files and directories on NTFS. In Figure 1, you can see an MTF record has several sections describing the metadata about the file and pointers to blocks that make up the file.

In this post, we’re going to walk through configuring Active Directory authentication for SQL Server on Linux. We will start by joining the Linux server to the domain, configuring SQL Server on Linux to communicate to the domain, and then use adutil to create our AD users and set up Kerberos for SQL Server login authentication. Before getting started First, let’s get some environment requirements set. We’ll need an Active Directory domain, a Linux host to install SQL Server on, some DNS records for that host, and the DNS client on that host configured for our environment.

My updated course “Configuring and Managing Kubernetes Networking, Services, and Ingress” is now available on Pluralsight here! If you want to learn about the course, check out the trailer here, or if you’re going to dive right in, check it out here! It’s time to dig deeper into Kubernetes networking! You will learn Kubernetes cluster networking fundamentals and configuring and accessing applications in a Kubernetes Cluster with Services and Ingress.

The intent of this post is a quick reference guide based on the recommendations made on Pure Storage Support page in the Microsoft Platform Guide. The target audience for this blog post is for SQL Server DBAs introducing them to the most impactful configurations and settings for running SQL Server on physical machines on Pure Storage. Physical Host Configuration Check with your hardware vendor to see if they publish a guide for SQL Server-specific configurations for their server platforms.

This post is a reference post for retrieving IO statistics for data and log files in SQL Server. We’ll look at where we can find IO statistics in SQL Server, query it to produce meaningful metrics, and discuss some key points when interpreting this data. The Source DMF The primary source for file latency data is the dynamic management function sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats. The data in this DMF is per file. The query below joins with sys.

The intent of this post is a quick reference guide based on the recommendation made in “Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere” April 2019 version. The target audience for this blog post is for SQL Server DBAs introducing them to the most impactful configurations and settings for running SQL Server in VMware. For the explanations for each of these settings and how to configure the base VMware infrastructure, please read the “Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere” guide and consult with your VMware administrators and experts.

This post will walk you through setting file permissions on database files copied into a container. The SQL Server process sqlservr running in containers runs as the non-privileged user mssql. The appropriate permissions on files are needed, so the SQL Server process has the proper access to any database files, log files, and backup files. Start up a container First up, let’s start up a container. Here’s we’re starting up SQL Server 2019 CU11 and attaching a Docker data volume for our persistent data.

Every once in a while when I’m recording a Pluralsight course, I’ll take a photo of my desk to let people see the behind the scenes of the process. Well, my friend Steve Jones (@way0utwest) encouraged me to write a desk setup post…so here we go! Desk Autonomous SmartDesk 2 - Home Office Most standup desks come at a much higher price point, and this one lands somewhere between $379-$500 depending on the features.