One of the most common tasks for ApexSQL Log is to be used as part of a post-incident investigation, usually involving inadvertently or maliciously changed or damaged data to determine who made the changes, what exactly was changed, when and how. With ApexSQL Log, users can dig into the transaction log files and see the exact values before and after the change has occurred as well as review the complete history of changes on the affected rows.
August 24, 2018Top things you need in a SQL Server performance monitoring tool (from deadlocks monitoring to alerting and index monitoring)
The initial article, Top things you need in a SQL Server performance monitoring tool (from performance metrics to wait statistic and query performance monitoring) covers the most important “things” that any DBA expects to find in an SQL Server performance monitoring application and how those are covered in ApexSQL Monitor. This sequel will cover another set of critical and essential information that any successful SQL Server performance monitoring tool should be able to monitor and present in a manner that is easy to understand and interpret, and how those are covered in ApexSQL Monitor
August 16, 2018SQL Server database Forensic auditing including row history and before-and-after auditing
Prevention is one of the most powerful approaches against any inadvertent or malicious events. But it is not always possible to prepare for all different calamities which may take place in SQL Server environments. Inadvertent changes, SQL injection attacks, malicious manipulations are some of the most frequent disasters SQL Server DBAs and engineers encounter. While the recovery process for the specific events which has negatively impacted the database is paramount, the next critical task in all situations is to find out who or what made the changes, what was changed and when. Gathering this information is a key for preventing other similar events which can affect SQL Server databases and endanger the data, as well as the business itself.
August 14, 2018Load testing: Recording production transactions and replaying on a test server
Load testing not always the same as stress testing. Stress testing seeks to maximize the load on a server to see when and where it breaks. In theory, you can escalate the load until you isolate those failure points, even to a point where the stress exerted on the server may far exceed anything that would be experienced on production
August 13, 2018Hands free, no-coding SQL Server database replication of a reporting database
ApexSQL Log is an amazing tool for reading the transaction log and reading the transaction log can form the basis of a lot of great features, functionality. In this case, we’ll look at how you can use ApexSQL Log for transactional replication to keep a reporting database up to date with your production system.
August 7, 2018Why is database continuous integration and delivery so hard and how to make it easy; SQL Server database DevOps pain points and solutions
Database DevOps pain points
Traditionally the database has always been the bottleneck for full adoption of DevOps. For a variety of reasons continuous integration and delivery of databases is just harder than client applications. The reasons for this include the following
August 7, 2018Top things you need in a SQL Server performance monitoring tool (from performance metrics to wait statistic and query performance monitoring)
SQL Server is an excellent platform to use as a backend for various database applications. It offers a fast and stable basis that allows the application to run fast, increasing the end user productivity and faster turnaround for a company. Coupled with a reliable tool with a graphical interface such as SQL Server Management Studio it makes creating tables, data manipulation, functions and stored procedures development, resources optimization, etc., to be performed in no time at all.
August 6, 2018What is SQL Server database continuous integration (CI)? – a high level conceptual overview and walk thru of the steps in a SQL database CI pipeline
If you’ve never automated builds in SQL Server before and but are still CI-curious, then this quick high-level overview, should introduce to you the basics and maybe even lead to you wading into the water a little deeper
First, continuous integration means that you will rapidly iterate changes, so that each time a change is formally made, usually by a source control commit, then the target system, a database in our case is automatically destroyed and recreated with the change. Furthermore, the entire test environment is recreated with a combination of static and test data, any automated tests and/or reviews are conducted, and the build is fully documented.
July 26, 2018Top things you need in a SQL Server query plan analysis tool
SQL Server query plans AKA execution plans are one of the greatest assets when it comes to tuning, optimizing, and troubleshooting our queries. Transact-SQL is a declarative language that can be used to query data without requiring a human interaction to specify an exact execution plan to be followed. This simply means that we are not telling SQL Server how to go and fetch the data, we’re just telling it what data we want it to get. So, think of an execution plan as a map. It is a map that the query optimizer is drawing that represents an efficient execution plan to retrieve the data.
July 13, 2018
