Data Masking is not enough to protect personal information from prying eyes!
Data Masking is the process of either obfuscating or replacing personally identifying information with meaningless data that cannot be used to identify the items being masked. The data masking process is frequently used to alter…
Enumerating SQL Server instances on a remote Windows host
Programmatically enumerating a list of SQL Server instances from a remote Windows server can be challenging. If you have the Remote Registry activated, and know the name of the target server, you can fairly easily…
Detect Microsoft .Net Framework versions
I use the following code to determine which specific version of the Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 is installed on my SQL Server. It detects versions from 4.5 to 4.7, and can be easily extended as…
Wait Stats capture script
Performance troubleshooting should begin with capturing wait stats so we can understand where SQL Server is busy. The script below captures wait stats into a table in tempdb; the script should be ran via a…
Backup Performance Testing
Reliable database backups are perhaps the single most important aspect of a Database Administrator’s job. The business risk from data-loss that can occur without a reliable database backup are substantial enough to bring many smaller…
SQL Server Agent Job Activity
SQL Server Agent provides a graphical user interface to inspect the status of agent jobs. The Job Activity Monitor looks like: However, if you want to programmatically obtain the detail about running jobs, including details…