Should You Use SQL Server Readable Secondaries If Queries Can Fail Repeatedly at Any Time?

If you use readable secondaries in Availability Groups or Read-Scale out instances in Azure SQL Managed Instance, you may have queries fail repeatedly if there is a glitch and statistics are not successfully ‘refreshed’ on the secondary replica. Those queries may keep failing until you manually intervene.

It’s unclear if Microsoft will ever fix this. There is a well established support deflection article which documents the issue and provides ‘workarounds’.

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Does Adding NOINDEX Change DBCC CHECKDB with PHYSICAL_ONLY?

The NOINDEX option does change the behavior of DBCC CHECKDB (even if you’re already using PHYSICAL_ONLY). Here’s how the two options compare to one another, and how to see the difference yourself in a simple example.

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Corrupting Databases for Dummies- Hex Editor Edition

This Post Tells You How To Corrupt a SQL Server Database with a Hex Editor in Gruesome Detail

And that’s all this post tells you. Not how to fix anything, just how to break it.

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Backups - Using SQL Agent Tokens to Set the Date, and Why to go MultiFile

My life is a bit easier since I learned how to use SQL agent tokens. They are particularly nice for setting date and timestamps on backup files. Unfortunately, they only work in the context of executing agent jobs.

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