Logins, SIDs, and Kerberos from First Principles, Part 2: The Vanishing Service Account
Years ago at a previous employer, I wrote a fleet-sweep script that searched every SQL Server instance in the estate for a specific service account, by name and by a known-bad SID. I no longer…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 11: The Keys Nobody Backs Up – SMK, DMK, and a War Story
ended the series with a rule: key material is a third artifact class beside data backups and log backups, and it needs its own backup. That post demonstrated the certificate side. This bonus part climbs…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 8: Verification – Your Backup Job Succeeding Proves Almost Nothing
ended on an uncomfortable question: the “clean” full backup I used to repair a corrupted page – how did I know it was clean? This part demonstrates, with a deliberately corrupted database, exactly how little…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 7: Page-Level Restore – Fixing 8 KB Instead of 8 TB
Storage corrupted one 8 KB page in a large table. One option: restore the entire database from backup, losing hours to I/O. The better option, when the damage is small and isolated: restore just that…
Stop Disabling Foreign Keys: Use a Topological Sort Instead
You inherit a PostgreSQL cleanup script. The very first line is:
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1 |
SET SESSION_REPLICATION_ROLE TO REPLICA; |
It works. Every table gets wiped clean, no FK errors, no complaints. Then one day somebody adds a new table to the schema,…
The psqlODBC Driver Is Eating Your RAISE NOTICE Messages
I just spent two days debugging a problem where my PowerShell script was logging 900 lines of output instead of 150. The script worked fine for months. Then someone added more tables to the process,…