Steve Stedman

The Critical Importance of Good Backups in SQL Server In the world of database management, the importance of maintaining robust and reliable backups cannot be overstated. Whether you’re a database administrator, developer, or business owner, understanding and implementing a solid backup strategy for your SQL Server is not just best practice—it’s essential for safeguarding your data against potential disasters. Today, …

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Mastering Common Table Expressions (CTEs) in SQL Server Common Table Expressions (CTEs) are a powerful feature in SQL Server that can make your queries more readable, more expressive, and often more efficient. Today, we’ll demystify this tool and invite you to delve deeper through my specialized class on CTEs. What is a Common Table Expression? A Common Table Expression, or …

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Enhancing SQL Server Health with Daily Monitoring and Proactive Alerting As SQL Server professionals, we understand the critical nature of maintaining the health and performance of your database systems. It’s not just about avoiding downtime; it’s about ensuring your data is secure, accessible, and performing optimally. At Stedman Solutions, we’ve developed a comprehensive approach to SQL Server monitoring that keeps …

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CLR (Common Language Runtime) is a feature of SQL Server that allows you to create and run managed code within the database engine. Enabling CLR on SQL Server allows you to create stored procedures, triggers, and functions using languages such as C# and VB.NET. The “CLR strict security” option is an important security feature of CLR that allows you to …

Securing SQL Server: Securing CLR Read more »

This chapter refers to shrinking your database files (mdf, or ndf files), not shrinking the log file. The log file is a completely different conversation, however, shrink database does shrink the log file. Not shrinking your database is one of the more counter intuitive things out there. You might think that a smaller database is a good thing, however there …

SQL Server DBCC Commands: Shrinking Notes Read more »

Merry Christmas from the team at Stedman Solutions, LLC. Our offices will be closed to celebrate Christmas this year.

Over the years I have documented many of the concepts around corruption repair. Want to find out more, check out the corruption category at by blog. There are several common causes of database corruption in SQL Server, including: * Hardware failures: Hard drives, memory chips, or other hardware components can fail, causing data to be lost or damaged. * System …

SQL Server Corruption: What Causes Corruption Read more »

Wait statistics, in the context of SQL Server, refer to the amount of time that a query spends waiting to access data in the database. When a client application requests data from the database, the request is placed in a queue and the client application must wait for its turn to access the data. The time that the query spends …

SQL Server Wait Type: PREEMPTIVE_HADR_LEASE_MECHANISM Read more »

Keep Your SQL Server Running Smoothly During the Holidays with Stedman Solutions’ Managed Services Contact us to find out how Stedman Solutions can help with your SQL Server environment. The holiday season is here, and with it comes the well-deserved breaks and vacations for many in the IT industry. However, SQL Servers don’t take holidays. They continue to run, process …

Keep Your SQL Server Running Smoothly During the Holidays Read more »

Each month we report on the most common waits that we see reported by our daily monitoring customers. All the data is sanitized, so there is no private client information to expose here. For this month, here are the details. PAGELATCH_UP CXCONSUMER CXPACKET SP_SERVER_DIAGNOSTICS_SLEEP SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD LCK_M_IS LCK_M_IX PAGELATCH_SH ASYNC_NETWORK_IO PREEMPTIVE_OS_GETPROCADDRESS Our daily monitoring product scans your SQL Server hourly and …

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