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  • Troubleshooting Database Mirroring Issues in SQL Server

    Database Mirroring is deprecated, but you will still see it in many production environments. It was officially marked deprecated in SQL Server 2012 and has remained in that state for well over a decade. In my own career as a DBA, it has been “deprecated” the entire time, yet still widely deployed and fully supported.…

  • Get Current Date & Time in SQL Server

    Getting the current date and time in SQL Server is straightforward. Choosing the correct function for your workload is what matters. Whether you’re stamping audit rows, logging ETL runs, or investigating production issues, SQL Server exposes several built-in functions with different precision and return types. All of these functions use the Windows OS clock of…

  • Creating SQL Logins on an Availability Group (AG) Environment

    In an Availability Group, the databases fail over. Your SQL logins do not. For Windows domain logins, the SID is owned by AD, so you just create the login on each replica and it syncs up. For SQL logins, the SID is generated inside SQL Server. If the SID differs between replicas, the database user…

  • Grant VIEW SERVER STATE in SQL Server

    VIEW SERVER STATE is the permission that unlocks most server-level DMVs and DMFs. If someone can’t run basic instance health checks and keeps hitting permission errors, this is usually why. It gives visibility into what is happening on the box right now: active sessions, running requests, waits, connection details, and plan cache level query stats.…

  • How to Get the SQL Server IP Address

    When troubleshooting connectivity, firewall rules, or unexpected routing, you often need one simple answer: which IP address and port did my session actually connect to? SQL Server can listen on multiple IPs (and listeners can resolve to multiple addresses), so the hostname in your connection string does not always tell you what you really hit.…

  • SQL Server Error Severities Explained

    When SQL Server raises an error, it includes more than just a message. Every Database Engine error contains the following: Out of all of these, severity is the fastest way to understand how serious the issue is and who is likely responsible for fixing it. Severity levels range from 0 to 24 and indicate whether…

  • How to Right-Size SQL Server Database Files

    Auto-growth is not the problem. Unplanned, reactive growth is. When database files are undersized, SQL Server is forced to extend them repeatedly under load. Each growth event introduces a pause. If those pauses occur during peak workload, they can cause noticeable latency, increased I/O pressure, and in some cases application timeouts. Right-sizing database files is…

  • SQL Server: ALTER DATABASE SET ENABLE_BROKER Taking a Long Time (Fix)

    After a recent Availability Group failover, Database Mail stopped sending emails. On investigation, the underlying cause was Service Broker not being enabled on the system database required by Database Mail. To confirm the status, I ran: The is_broker_enabled column was returning 0, indicating that Service Broker was disabled for that database. I then attempted to…

  • SQL Server: Ad hoc Update to System Catalogs is Not Supported (Fix)

    While enabling show advanced options using sp_configure, I encountered an unexpected failure when executing RECONFIGURE: The change would not apply, and any further configuration attempts failed in the same way. This issue typically appears on systems where older configuration settings have been modified and never reset. In most cases, the root cause is the legacy…

  • How to Kill a SPID in SQL Server

    In SQL Server, every connection to the database engine is assigned a Session Process ID, commonly known as a SPID. There are situations where you may need to kill a SPID in SQL Server. This typically occurs when a session is blocking other queries, running indefinitely, holding locks during maintenance, or preventing a database from…

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