There are many methods available for optimizing the performance of SQL Server. One method in particular is examining your plan cache, looking for query plan warnings. Plan warnings include implicit conversions, key or RID lookups, and missing indexes to name a few. Each of these warnings is the optimizer giving you the opportunity to take … Read more
I’ve written before about using sqlmap to perform sql injection testing against a website. It is also possible to use sqlmap to connect directly against a database. In this post I will show you how to use sqlmap to connect directly to Azure SQL Database. Once connected you can enumerate objects, open a shell, or … Read more
At SQL Server Live last November, I demonstrated enabling SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database. During the class discussion I explained you must use Powershell to modify SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database. So, that’s my post today, showing you how it is done. By default, SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database will enable the … Read more
Last October I wrote a review of the Gigaom SQL Transactional Processing Price-Performance test. That post references the original data warehouse test also published by Gigaom. I believe both Gigaom reports were funded by Microsoft. I found the first report on data warehousing to be of good quality. The SQL transaction report had some weak … Read more
Last month, SolarWinds completed the purchase of VividCortex, a database performance monitoring solution for popular open source systems such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, and Redis. I was fortunate to visit Austin about a week after the purchase. During my visit I met with members of the VividCortex team. We had deep discussions about … Read more
Earlier this month Microsoft and GigaOM announced a new benchmark study comparing AWS RDS to Azure SQL Database. This study was authored by the same people that wrote the previous GigaOM data warehouse benchmark last year. I enjoyed the data warehouse study. I found it to be fair and thorough enough to help the reader … Read more
