But here’s the reality: SQL Server 2016 has reached end of life. And that shouldn’t be ignored.

What “End of Life” Actually Means

When Microsoft ends support for a product, it’s not just a technical milestone—it’s a risk shift. The list of ‘cons’ becomes much longer than the list of  ‘pros’ when deciding if an upgrade is neccesary yet, or if you can put it off another year. 

Officially SQL Server 2016 will have:

• No more security updates

• No bug fixes or patches

• No official Microsoft support

• Increased exposure to vulnerabilities and compliance risks

Even if your system seems stable today, it’s now operating without a safety net. And in today’s environment, that’s a serious concern.

The Hidden Cost of Staying Put

Delaying an upgrade might feel like the easier (and cheaper) option—but it often comes with hidden costs such as security risks, compliance issues, performance limiations and the need for emergency migrations.

Without ongoing patches, your database becomes more vulnerable to attacks, especially ransomware targeting outdated systems. Many industries require supported software. Running end-of-life systems can put you out of compliance with security standars. Older systems miss out on years of performance improvements, optimization features, and efficiency gains. Waiting too long often leads to rushed, reactive upgrades after a failure or breach—which are far more expensive and disruptive.

What You Gain by Upgrading

Moving to a modern platform like SQL Server 2025 isn’t just about staying supported, it’s about unlocking better performance, resilience, and flexibility. Newer versions bring query optimization, smarter resource usage, and faster processing, improving overall performance. There’s also some exciting new ways to make backup recovery smarter like: 

• True full and differential backups on secondary replicas

• Improved compression with ZSTD

• Immutable backup storage options

The new upgrade also means stronger security and cloud-ready flexibility. Modern encryption, threat detection, and tighter integration with cloud security tools help protect your data. And easier integration with Azure and hybrid environments gives you more options for scaling and disaster  recoverry.

Migration Doesn’t Have to Be Overwhelming

One of the biggest reasons businesses delay upgrading is fear of disruption. Downtime, data loss, compatibility issues, etc.  But with the right strategy migrations can be smoooth, controlled, and predictable.

A well executed upgrade includes:

• A full assessment of your current environment

• Compatibility and workload analysis

• A clear migration plan with rollback options

• Testing before going live

• Minimal downtime during cutover

How We Help

We specialize in helping businesses move from outdated systems to modern, optimized environments—without the chaos.

Our approach focuses on:

✔️ Safe, secure data migration

✔️ Minimal disruption to your operations

✔️ Performance tuning post-upgrade

✔️ Modern backup and recovery setup

✔️ Long-term scalability and support

Whether you’re running a single database or a complex environment, we make the transition manageable and worth it.

Ready to Modernize Your SQL Environment?

If you’re still on SQL Server 2016, now is the time to act. Let’s build a plan to upgrade your system, migrate your data safely, and set you up with a faster, more secure, and more resilient environment.

Reach out today to start your upgrade the right way.

The post Still Running SQL Server 2016? Here’s Why It’s Time to Upgrade appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

I will go through a couple of common scenarios that we frequently encounter and give T-SQL and PowerShell solutions.

Is Max Memory Set Appropriately?

Let’s start small: Finding max memory values and evaluating if they are appropriate.

T-SQL Script:

Source code

SELECT mem.total_physical_memory_kb / 1024 'server memory (MB)'
 
,configs.value_in_use 'max server memory (MB)'
 
FROM sys.dm_os_sys_memory mem
 
cross apply (
 
SELECT value_in_use
 
FROM sys.configurations
 
WHERE name = 'max server memory (MB)'
 
) configs

T-SQL Results:

With that information, I can make a determination if Max Memory is set appropriately. If not, I can calculate an appropriate value and go implement the change.

PowerShell Script:

Source code

Test-DbaMaxMemory -SqlInstance SSG-LT-KBURWELL

PowerShell Results:

Again, this is a basic example, and the T-SQL isn’t exactly complex, but the PowerShell is much easier and even gives you a recommendation for Max Memory.

LastFullBackup

The T-SQL for this is also rather easy, but the tricky part is running it against multiple instances and returning a single result set.

T-SQL Script:

Source code

SELECT database_name
 
,MAX(backup_start_date) latest_full
 
FROM msdb.dbo.backupset s
 
WHERE s.type = 'D'
 
GROUP BY s.database_name

T-SQL Results:

As I mentioned, this is a very simple script, but this is only for one instance. If you want to run this against multiple instances, you will need to do some additional setup, such as configuring linked servers or a Central Management Server, neither of which I will be detailing here. Instead, I will show how easy it is to query multiple instances in PowerShell.

PowerShell Script:

Source code

Get-DbaLastBackup -SqlInstance SSG-LT-KBURWELL

PowerShell Results:

One simple command and I get the same info, plus details for latest diff and log backups as well. Now let’s make a couple of changes so we can get results for multiple instances and make the output a little more friendly.

PowerShell Script:

Source code

Get-DbaLastBackup -SqlInstance SSG-LT-KBURWELL,SSG-LT-KBURWELL\MSSQLSERVER01 -ExcludeDatabase msdb,model,master | Format-Table

I made 3 minor changes to the script, but it is still a single line of code and now reads from multiple instances and formats the output as a table.

• Change 1: Added an additional SQL instance to the -SqlInstance parameter.
• Change 2: Added the -ExcludeDatabase parameter and passed in the system databases.
• Change 3: Piped the results to Format-Table

PowerShell Results:

Let’s take it one step further and generate a spreadsheet from the results.

PowerShell Script:

Source code

Get-DbaLastBackup -SqlInstance SSG-LT-KBURWELL,SSG-LT-KBURWELL\MSSQLSERVER01 -ExcludeDatabase msdb,model,master | Export-Excel -Path C:\Temp\LastBackups.xlsx

Instead of piping the results to Format-Table, I am piping the results to Export-Excel and providing a file path and name. Now I have a spreadsheet that I can share with whomever might want to see it.

Getting results from SSMS into Excel is obviously possible, it just requires extra manual steps. It’s much quicker to just have PowerShell do it for you.

“It’s easier”

When I say PowerShell is easier, I’m not just talking about the simplicity of commands. I’m also talking about how easy it is to add in functionality, such as querying multiple instances, combining the results, and exporting them to Excel.

If you are perfectly happy using T-SQL and SSMS, then by all means, continue to do so. But, I do encourage you to explore PowerShell, specifically the DBATools module. I will be following up this post with more complex Powershell examples such as copying databases between SQL instances and keeping AG objects synchronized between replicas. Stay tuned for more answers to the question “why use PowerShell?”

The post Why use PowerShell when you can use T-SQL? appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

True Full and Differential Backups on Secondary Replicas

For years, database professionals faced a frustrating limitation. With Availability Groups, you could offload some workloads to secondary replicas—but not your real backup strategy.Yes, you could run copy-only backups on a secondary. But true full backups? Differential backups that maintain the LSN chain? Those had to run on the primary replica, until now. SQL Server 2025 introduces the ability to run true full backups and true differential backups on secondary replicas.

That means:

• You can move your entire backup workload off the primary.

• Your backup plan behaves exactly the same as if it were running on the primary.

• You potentially reduce your RPO by running backups more frequently.

This isn’t just a convenience feature—it’s a performance and resilience upgrade.

ZSTD Backup Compression

Another enhancement is the introduction of ZSTD backup compression, an algorithm originally developed at Facebook. Until now, SQL Server used MSXpress as the default compression method. ZSTD brings:

• Slightly better compression ratios

• Faster compression in many cases

• Less CPU overhead during decompression

• Potentially faster restores

In Randy’s testing—and in benchmarking done by Aaron Bertrand on an 8TB Stack Overflow database—backup sizes weren’t dramatically smaller. A 50GB database might shrink from 15GB to 14.5GB. That doesn’t sound revolutionary, but at scale it really adds up!

If you’re backing up multi-terabyte databases with long retention periods, even small savings compound quickly. Smaller backups also mean improved storage efficiency and potential restore performance gains. It’s not flashy—but it’s practical, which matters. 

Immutable Backups in Azure Blob Storage

Backing up directly to Azure Blob Storage isn’t new. But SQL Server 2025 now supports backups to immutable Azure Blob storage accounts.This enhancement strengthens ransomware protection. Immutable storage ensures that once a backup is written, it cannot be modified. The only permitted action is deletion under defined rules. While not truly air-gapped, this approach creates a powerful safeguard against backup tampering. In a world where ransomware targets backups first, this feature significantly improves recovery confidence.

Why These Enhancements Matter

SQL Server 2025 doesn’t reinvent backup strategy—it strengthens it.

• Offload backup workloads to secondary replicas

• Improve compression efficiency at scale

• Harden backup security against ransomware

Individually, these updates are incremental. Together, they represent a meaningful evolution in database resilience and performance. For organizations running mission-critical systems, that’s an especially big deal.

The post Backup Just Got Smarter: What’s New in Microsoft SQL Server 2025 appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

Problem Statement

The client noticed the D (data) drive was running out of free space and they asked us to investigate. We found that the SQL Logs folder was much larger than we’d expect. A considerable amount of this data was not database files (.mdf, .ldf, .ndf), but rather log files (.log and anything with a .Number file extension):

Upon further investigation we could see that there were a large number of files starting with SQLFT%. These are full text error files:

At this point we knew the culprit and had to dig into our full text indexes.

Investigation

SQL Error Log

If you also check your SQL Error log in SSMS, you will likely see a constant stop and restart of the Full-Text process:

If we want specific details around which table/index is causing issues, we will have to check the Full-Text error log directly.

Reading Your Full-Text Error Log

There’s no GUI way of reading the Full-Text error log in SSMS. To do that, you’ll have to read the file off disk directly. And for that, you’ll need xp_cmdshell enabled, as follows:

Source code

EXEC SP_CONFIGURE 'show advanced options', 1;
RECONFIGURE;
EXEC SP_CONFIGURE 'xp_cmdshell', 1;
RECONFIGURE;

You can then read this file (and any others) using the query below:

Source code

EXEC xp_cmdshell 'type "D:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL13.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\Log\FDLAUNCHERRORLOG"';

The potential challenge here is: if you’ve got an issue with Full-Text then this file has the potential to be very large (in this scenario, it was 2.4GB). A file of that size may well make this approach prohibitive.

Manually Reading the Error Log

You won’t be able to open the FDLAUNCHERRORLOG file directly if it’s in use with SQL Server so in this case you will have to take a copy of the file and read the copy. However, there are file size limitations with tools such as Notepad. You will need to use an application that can deal with these large files (VScode, Notepad++, etc.) or something that’s specifically designed to open large text files (Large Text File Viewer, KLOGG, etc).

If you need to copy this text file to a different server, I highly recommend zipping the file first. The files are often multiple GB but because it’s a lot of repeated data, they compress really well. It’ll save you a bunch of time in data transfer over your network.

Error Log Output

Once you’re able to read the error log, you will see an output like this which gives you the specific table or indexed view which is the issue here:

This is where (at least one) of our issues are. It’s worth noting that there may well be more than one object involved here. We’re looking for the largest culprit, but once we that one we may well have others that will require our attention. We’ll deal with that when we come to it, though.

Remediation

Rebuilding Full-Text Catalogue

The first thing we want to do is to rebuild our Full-Text catalogue for the affected database. You can easily do this in SSMS:

A rebuild should fix the issue. But if not, you’ll have to go to the next step.

Rebuilding Indexes

Luckily, in our scenario the table involved was small so this wasn’t a concern. However, rebuilding indexes comes with the dual caveats that, in larger environments, it can take a long time to complete a rebuild, and it will also consume resources and may potentially cause blocking. In this scenario, you’ll want to do this out of hours or inside a maintenance window.

An important note here: We’d recommend just rebuilding the clustered index if you have one. By doing this, the system will automatically rebuild all other indexes on the table. You can do this using the GUI:

If you’re more comfortable working with code, then you can perform this manually too:

Source code

ALTER INDEX [IndexName] ON [dbo].[TableName] REBUILD

Once this is rebuilt (and assuming it returns without errors), you should be golden. You then want to follow the process below to allow you to cycle the log files.

Cycling your Full-Text Log Files

There is an undocumented stored procedure that lets you cycle your Full-Text log files the same way you are (hopefully) cycling your SQL Error Logs:

Source code

EXEC sp_fulltext_recycle_crawl_log @ftcat = ‘FullText CATALOG Name;

This will deallocate the old log files and create new ones. At this point you’re free to delete or move these log files that are filling the drive to free up the disk space. And don’t worry: If you try to delete a file that’s currently in use by SQL Server (the current log files, for example) you won’t be able to.

Cycling your Full-Text master error log

There is no way of doing this within SSMS. You can do it with this command:

Source code

EXEC sp_fulltext_service 'cycle_errorlog';

This will allow you to cycle out this error log, too, if you need to delete the file to free up space.

At this point, we have fixed the full text indexes on this database. We may, however, have issues with multiple databases. If we check the SQL Error log and see new errors appearing, then we haven’t quite fixed the whole problem. We will want to go through this process again (check the logs, rebuild indexes, cycle error log files) until we’ve fixed all our problems.

DBCC CHECKTABLE

Once we’ve fixed all the issues with Full-Text search it’s a great idea to perform a DBCC CHECKTABLE on the affected tables to ensure we’re not dealing with a corruption issue. CHECKTABLE is much lighter than a full CHECKDB, but it still does read the entire table  to perform the check. Yes, this is another process that we would want to be careful and perform outside of working hours if at all possible if the table we’re dealing with is large in our environment.

Source code

USE [DBName]
 
GO
 
DBCC CHECKTABLE (‘TableName’) WITH WITH ALL_ERRORMSGS, NO_INFOMSGS

This will return any errors encountered while also avoiding any noise from informational messages.

You can see the output in the error log:

Final Thoughts

If you discover corruption, review this post I wrote on the topic. If you don’t, you should be good to go — and give yourself a pat on your back for a job well done!

And, if you find you can’t solve a Full-Text index issue yourself, we’re always standing by to assist you.

The post Fixing Full-Text Index Issues appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

SQL Server 2025 continues Microsoft’s steady focus on performance, reliability, and intelligent automation. Rather than introducing one dramatic overhaul, this release delivers a collection of meaningful, incremental improvements that—when combined—can result in noticeable gains for many workloads.

During a recent discussion, Rich and Kyle walked through several of the most impactful enhancements, focusing on Intelligent Query Processing, concurrency improvements, columnstore indexes, and long-awaited TempDB upgrades.

Smarter Query Performance with Intelligent Query Processing (IQP)

Intelligent Query Processing isn’t new, but SQL Server 2025 refines it further. IQP is an umbrella term covering a set of features designed to make the query optimizer more adaptive and accurate over time.

One key area of improvement is cardinality estimation—the process SQL Server uses to estimate how many rows will flow through each step of a query plan. Anyone who has tuned performance knows how damaging a mismatch between estimated and actual rows can be. SQL Server 2025 introduces incremental enhancements to these estimations, which, in most cases, translate to better execution plans and improved default performance without any code changes.

As with any optimizer change, edge cases still exist. Large jumps in behavior—such as the one between SQL Server 2014 and 2016—sometimes caused regressions in specific workloads. While the changes in 2025 are far less dramatic, testing remains essential when upgrading.

Another IQP enhancement is parameter-sensitive optimization, which addresses long-standing issues related to parameter sniffing. When query parameters vary significantly between executions, SQL Server can now better recognize those differences and adjust execution strategies accordingly, reducing performance instability.

Degree of parallelism (DOP) feedback also continues to evolve. Rather than making a one-time decision based solely on cost thresholds and configuration values, SQL Server now evaluates how well a query performs when running in parallel and adjusts its behavior over time. This allows the engine to fine-tune parallelism instead of blindly running at maximum settings. While powerful, it does require familiarity with execution plans to fully understand how SQL Server is adapting behind the scenes.

Adaptive Joins That Adjust on the Fly

Adaptive joins build on SQL Server’s ability to recover from imperfect statistics. Traditionally, SQL Server commits to a join strategy—such as nested loops or hash joins—based on cardinality estimates. If those estimates are wrong, the query can suffer dramatically.

With adaptive joins, SQL Server can change its mind mid-execution. If a join starts as a loop join but processes far more rows than expected, the engine can switch to a more appropriate join type, such as a hash join, while the query is still running.

SQL Server 2025 improves adaptive joins further, especially in complex scenarios involving multiple joins. This makes the engine more resilient in real-world environments where statistics are rarely perfect.

Improved Concurrency Through Smarter Locking

Concurrency is another area receiving meaningful attention. SQL Server has long relied on various lock types—row, key, page, range, and table locks—with relatively rigid thresholds for escalation.

Historically, modifying a few thousand rows could trigger escalation to a full table lock, leading many teams to design batch operations around that behavior. SQL Server 2025 is more nuanced. It can now hold thousands of locks without immediately escalating to a table lock when doing so would be unnecessary or harmful.

These optimized locking improvements, especially when combined with accelerated database recovery, have already shown dramatic reductions in blocking in real-world workloads. The engine is simply making better decisions about how much data truly needs to be locked.

Faster and More Efficient Columnstore Indexes

For organizations using columnstore indexes—particularly in data warehouse and analytics workloads—SQL Server 2025 brings performance gains across the board.

Compression is faster, index rebuilds complete more quickly, and the engine handles delta stores more efficiently. Delta stores, which temporarily hold newly inserted uncompressed data before it’s merged into compressed columnstore segments, are now managed more intelligently. This improves both data ingestion and query performance.

Reading from columnstore indexes has also been optimized, meaning analytics queries can run faster with no changes required at the application level.

TempDB Enhancements That DBAs Will Appreciate

TempDB has long been one of SQL Server’s most critical—and fragile—components. SQL Server 2025 introduces several enhancements that directly address common pain points.

One of the most significant changes is the ability to govern TempDB usage using Resource Governor. DBAs can now set quotas that prevent individual queries or workloads from consuming excessive TempDB space. When a query exceeds its limit, SQL Server cancels it before TempDB fills up, preventing server-wide outages.

This is especially valuable in environments where large reports or unfiltered queries can consume hundreds of gigabytes and bring systems to a halt—often in the middle of the night.

SQL Server 2025 also brings accelerated database recovery (ADR) to TempDB. Large rollbacks that previously took minutes can now complete almost instantly, reducing downtime and improving system responsiveness during heavy workloads.

To support monitoring and alerting, new DMV columns expose detailed TempDB usage metrics, including current usage, peak usage, and the number of TempDB limit violations. These additions make it far easier for DBAs and monitoring tools to detect issues before they escalate into outages.

A Practical Step Forward

Rather than reinventing SQL Server, the 2025 release refines the engine’s intelligence. Query plans adapt more effectively, locking decisions are smarter, analytics workloads run faster, and TempDB becomes far more manageable.

For teams considering an upgrade, SQL Server 2025 offers tangible performance and reliability improvements—especially for environments that struggle with concurrency, large analytical workloads, or TempDB pressure. As always, thorough testing is key, but for many workloads, the benefits will be felt immediately.

The post SQL Server 2025 Performance Enhancements: What Developers and DBAs Need to Know appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

TempDB Space Governance

This is the big one. We’re going to do extensive testing on this, but it looks extremely promising. In SQL Server 2025, Resource Governor can now limit how much TempDB space a workload is allowed to use. That means:

• One bad report can’t eat all of TempDB
• ETL jobs can’t bully OLTP workloads
• You can finally put hard limits on temp space usage

Why this matters

You may have run into the issue where TempDB gets filled by somebody running a huge reporting query. This fills the TempDB drive and brings down the production server. Sometimes you can’t help users from being users. This is usually compounded in virtualised environments if you’re using something like the AWS Instance Store when you can’t increase the size of this drive other than increasing your instance size (and cost).

Before 2025, Resource Governor could manage CPU and memory, but TempDB was the Wild West. Now it’s fenced in.

If a workload hits its TempDB limit:

• The request fails
• TempDB stays healthy
• The rest of the server keeps working

Example: Limit TempDB usage for a workload group

Note: There are some requirements for your TempDB configuration:

Source code

-- Enable Resource Governor
 
ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR RECONFIGURE
 
GO
 
-- Create a workload group with a TempDB limit of 25%
 
CREATE WORKLOAD GROUP ReportingGroup
 
WITH (GROUP_MAX_TEMPDB_DATA_PERCENT = 25)
 
GO
 
ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR RECONFIGURE
 
GO

By doing this you prevent the new workload group we created for using more than 25% of the TempDB space.

Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) in TempDB

ADR has been around for a while in user databases, but the fact that we can now use it on TempDB comes with some promising opportunities, but what is ADR exactly?

ADR is basically SQL Server’s way of cleaning up messes way faster. Instead of doing long painful rollbacks that make you stare at “rolling back transaction…” like it’s judging your life choices, ADR keeps a lightweight version store so SQL Server can undo work almost instantly.

That means cancelled queries don’t hang around forever, crash recovery is dramatically quicker, and the transaction log doesn’t balloon while SQL Server cleans up after a bad decision. Think of ADR as giving SQL Server an “undo” button that actually works.

What changes with ADR on TempDB?

• Cancelled queries clean up fast
• TempDB log truncates more aggressively
• Less waiting around for rollback to finish

If you’ve ever cancelled a big query and watched TempDB sit there bloated for minutes… yeah, this helps.

Enabling ADR for TempDB

It’s a simple command to enable ADR for any database:

Source code

ALTER DATABASE [tempdb]
 
SET ACCELERATED_DATABASE_RECOVERY = ON
 
GO

For tempdb, you’ll have to restart the SQL Service for this to take effect (because tempdb is recreated from scratch when you restart the SQL Service).

You can check whether ADR is enabled for tempdb by looking at sys.databases:

Source code

SELECT name, is_accelerated_database_recovery_on FROM sys.databases WHERE name = 'tempdb'

Why you should turn this on

TempDB is famously described as the public toilet of SQL Server, and this setting makes clean up a whole lot easier!

Fewer TempDB Headaches

SQL Server 2025 also brings a bunch of quieter improvements that indirectly help TempDB:

• Better memory grant feedback → fewer spills
• Smarter throttling for runaway queries
• Reduced contention under high concurrency

None of these are “headline features,” but together they mean:

• Less TempDB churn
• Fewer surprises
• Smoother performance under load

Final Thoughts

These are enhancements to TempDB in SQL Server 2025, rather than re-writes of the fundamentals.  Honestly, that’s a good thing. It gives you, as the DBA, extra control over tempdb on your servers and gives an overall better performing system. Definitely test these things in your test environment first though!

The post Enhancements to TempDB in SQL Server 2025 appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

Does the integrity of your SQL Server databases keep you up at night? Is an outage of your system a matter of when and not if? Do you dread a call from the C-suite asking why everything is down? If your heart rate went up just reading those scenarios, you can see why an SSG SQL Server Health  isn’t a luxury but a necessity. Don’t leave your business continuity up to chance.

Everything Runs on Data

Data is the currency of business, and unplanned database outages don’t just disrupt IT.

Industry reports from Gartner, ITIC, and others show that the financial impact of IT and database outages has reached historic highs, with costs for large enterprises often exceeding $1 million per hour. Gartner’s historical baseline of $5,600 per minute (~$336,000 per hour) remains a widely cited metric, but 2025-2026 data shows this has escalated to approximately $9,000 per minute for many firms. U.S. companies suffer an average of one unplanned downtime incident per month.

These days, database failure is likely to halt operations, impact customers, interrupt sales, and put revenue at risk. It could also get someone fired.

Our SQL Server Health Check

Be proactive and find problems in your SQL Server instances before they blow up. A Health Check from SQL Solutions Group helps you identify risks and how to fix issues, as we test everything from hardware to hypervisor/cloud configuration to OS to your SQL Server installation itself. Once we complete a Health Check on your instances, you receive:

• A comprehensive, executive-ready risk report
• Prioritized remediation roadmap
• Practical recommendations aligned to your business goals

Health Check Take-aways

In other words, you’ll have a clear plan for getting your instances as healthy as possible. You can do that work yourself, or you can leverage our expertise to get it done. Our goal with each SQL Server Health Check is to:

• Restore confidence in your databases
• Reduce downtime
• Improve resilience
• Support uninterrupted business operations
• Reduce your stress
• Give you peace of mind

If SQL Server supports your core systems, a proactive health check is so much more than a useful technical exercise. It’s a risk-management and ROI decision. You can’t afford the risk to your databases because the problems won’t go away if you ignore them. Address your ticking timebombs before your phone rings when you least want it to with a Health Check from SQL Solutions Group.

The post Why a SQL Server Health Check isn’t a Luxury appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

Getting Started

If you haven’t already, make sure you have DBATools installed. We are going to be using a command called Get-DbaDbFile to gather the information for us. This command only requires one parameter, -SqlInstance. Here is a snippet of what I get when I run it against my local dev instance:

This is a bit more information than we really need right now, so let’s trim it down and get some parameters added. For this script, we really only need SqlInstance, Database, TypeDescription, LogicalName, PhysicalName, Size, UsedSpace, and AvailableSpace. We can also exclude system databases from the result set. For readability, I am going to use Format-Table. I will also start to add in some parameters:

Source code

$SqlInstance = "SSG-LT-KBURWELL"
 
Get-DbaDbFile -SqlInstance $SqlInstance
 
Get-DbaDbFile -SqlInstance $SqlInstance -ExcludeDatabase master,model,msdb,tempdb |
 
    Select-Object SqlInstance, Database, TypeDescription, LogicalName, PhysicalName, Size, UsedSpace, AvailableSpace | Format-Table

Using Custom Objects

This will be much easier to work with, but it is important to be aware that the columns related to file size have GB, MB, and KB values, depending on what is most appropriate for that file size. This is great when just looking at the data like this, but can be a bit problematic for mathematical comparisons, which we will be doing later. To get around this, we can just use some custom objects:

Source code

$SqlInstance = "SSG-LT-KBURWELL"
 
Get-DbaDbFile -SqlInstance $SqlInstance -ExcludeDatabase master,model,msdb,tempdb |
 
    Select-Object SqlInstance, TypeDescription, LogicalName, PhysicalName,
 
     @{Name='DatabaseName'; Expression={$_.Database}},
 
     @{Name='SizeMB'; Expression={ [math]::Round($_.Size / 1MB, 2) }},
 
     @{Name='UsedSpaceMB'; Expression={ [math]::Round($_.UsedSpace / 1MB, 2) }},
 
     @{Name='AvailableSpaceMB'; Expression={ [math]::Round($_.AvailableSpace / 1MB, 2) }},
 
     @{Name='FreeSpacePercent'; Expression={
 
    if ($_.Size -gt 0) {
 
        $sizeMB = [math]::Round($_.Size / 1MB, 2)
 
        $availMB = [math]::Round($_.AvailableSpace / 1MB, 2)
 
        [math]::Round(($availMB / $sizeMB) * 100, 2)
 
        } else { 0 }
 
    }},
 
    @{Name='CaptureTimestamp'; Expression={ Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" }}
 
    | Format-Table

This converts all sizes to MB, which will make any mathematical operations much easier. I also included a custom object for DatabaseName, FileSpacePercent, and CaptureTimestamp. DatabaseName really just acts as a custom column name, which is necessary when loading the data into SQL.

On To The Comparisons

Now that we are getting only the data we need, we need to save it to a table so we can do point in time comparisons. As with everything else, DBATools makes this ridiculously easy. We just need to point it to an instance and a database, it will take care of the rest. Instead of piping our results to Format-Table, I am going to pipe them to a command that will build and load a SQL table:

Source code

$SqlInstance = "SSG-LT-KBURWELL"
 
$WriteInstance = "SSG-LT-KBURWELL"
 
$WriteDB = "DBA"
 
$WriteTable = "FileSizesAndUsage"
 
Get-DbaDbFile -SqlInstance $SqlInstance -ExcludeDatabase master,model,msdb,tempdb |
 
    Select-Object SqlInstance, TypeDescription, LogicalName, PhysicalName,
 
     @{Name='DatabaseName'; Expression={$_.Database}},
 
     @{Name='SizeMB'; Expression={ [math]::Round($_.Size / 1MB, 2) }},
 
     @{Name='UsedSpaceMB'; Expression={ [math]::Round($_.UsedSpace / 1MB, 2) }},
 
     @{Name='AvailableSpaceMB'; Expression={ [math]::Round($_.AvailableSpace / 1MB, 2) }},
 
     @{Name='FreeSpacePercent'; Expression={
 
    if ($_.Size -gt 0) {
 
        $sizeMB = [math]::Round($_.Size / 1MB, 2)
 
        $availMB = [math]::Round($_.AvailableSpace / 1MB, 2)
 
        [math]::Round(($availMB / $sizeMB) * 100, 2)
 
        } else { 0 }
 
    }},
 
    @{Name='CaptureTimestamp'; Expression={ Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss" }}
 
    | Write-DbaDbTableData -SqlInstance $WriteInstance -Database $WriteDB -Table $WriteTable -AutoCreateTable

Now I have the data in SQL Server:

With this information being collected regularly, via scheduled task or agent job, we can easily trend out how much our database files are growing. It will also make potential misconfigurations stand out, such as a 1TB mdf with 99% free space. Personally, I use it in client environments to find over-allocated files that can be shrunk to reclaim some space. I know, “shrink bad”, but sometimes you just need to do it. As you can see, it’s quite straightforward and rather easy to track database file sizes with Powershell!

The post Track Database File Sizes with PowerShell: A Quick Guide for DBAs appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

One of the more intriguing features introduced in SQL Server 2022 is Contained Availability Groups (AGs). At first glance, they look very similar to traditional AGs — but there are some key differences that can trip you up if you’re not prepared.

In this post, we’ll walk through:

• What a normal AG looks like (and its limitations)

• How Contained AGs change the game

• The pitfalls we’ve seen in real-world use

• Practical solutions if you run into these issues

A Quick Refresher: Always On Availability Groups

Availability Groups, introduced back in SQL Server 2012, are Microsoft’s built-in solution for high availability and disaster recovery. They let you replicate databases across multiple instances, managed by a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC).

Key benefits:

• Seamless failover between primary and secondary nodes

• Read-only replicas to offload workloads

• The ability to perform backups and DBCC checks on secondaries, easing the load on your primary

But AGs have always had one big limitation: only user databases are replicated. System databases like msdb and master stay local to each node.

Why does that matter? Think about Agent jobs:

• You have to manually install jobs on every node (and keep them in sync).

• Jobs need to be AG-aware — otherwise they might try to run against a read-only secondary.

• Job history lives only on the current primary, which makes tracking a little messy.

For years, DBAs have worked around these issues, but it’s always been a pain point.

*Enter Contained Availability Groups*

Contained AGs look and act like traditional AGs, but with one important twist: they include their own contained system databases.

For example, if you create a Contained AG called MyAg, you’ll see:

• MyAg_master

• MyAg_msdb

These are replicated to all nodes in the AG, just like user databases.

Why this matters

• Agent jobs now live inside the contained msdb. No more duplicating jobs on every node.

• Job history is replicated. After failover, you don’t lose tracking.

• System tables travel with the AG. Everything stays consistent across nodes.

That’s a big win for manageability and one of the headline features of SQL Server 2022.

Gotchas Seen in the Wild

As with most “new shiny” features, Contained AGs aren’t a silver bullet. There’s a few things to watch out for:

1. No more job offloading to secondaries. Jobs inside the contained msdb only run on the primary. If you used secondaries to handle CHECKDB or backups, you’ll need to rethink.

2. Replication is not supported. If transactional replication is part of your design, contained AGs may not be an option.

3. Seeding is clunky. The GUI doesn’t support manual seeding yet. You’ll need to fall back to T-SQL.

4. No distributed AG support. If you rely on DAGs for hybrid or geo-distributed HA, contained AGs won’t help.

5. Confusion with system databases. When you connect to the listener, the msdb and master you see belong to the contained AG — not the local system copies.

Workarounds & Solutions

For Agent Jobs

If you truly need jobs to run on a secondary node, you still can — but you’ll have to install them in the local msdb outside the contained AG. That means:

• Jobs must be AG-aware again

• You’ll have to maintain them separately

It’s not elegant, but it gets the job done.

For System Databases

This is case-by-case. If your code doesn’t touch master or msdb, you’re fine. But if you do, you’ll need to carefully evaluate whether those objects belong in the contained copies or the traditional system DBs.

Remember: you can query both contained and local msdbs — just make sure your scripts account for both.

Final Word

Contained Availability Groups solve one of the long-standing headaches of AGs — managing Agent jobs across nodes. But they come with trade-offs that every DBA needs to be aware of.

Test carefully. Know where your jobs live. And make sure your disaster recovery plan accounts for these differences.

If you want to see them in action, check out our webinar on SQL Server 2022 features, where we demo Contained AGs in detail.

The post Contained Availability Groups in SQL Server 2022: What You Need to Know appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.

What’s an Availability Group?

In short, Availability Groups (AGs) are a SQL Server feature that enables you to connect multiple servers together (at least two, limits depend upon your edition) so they can share databases. One server runs as the primary node and the others act as secondary nodes. In this example we’re going to assume we’re in a two-node AG with one primary node and one secondary node. We’re also going to assume we have a synchronous AG here.

In this setup, the nodes share the databases and sync with each other.  The primary server holds the primary copy of the database and the secondary server holds a read only copy of the same database. The idea is that if we lose the primary node for whatever reason, the AG will fail over and make the other node the primary node. This removes any downtime concerns and allows for things like patching to take place without making the database inaccessible while this happens.

The main issue people have is that while databases are shared between the two servers, we (as DBAs) have to keep all non-databases objects synchronized across both nodes — things like user logins, SQL Agent jobs and server level settings. We can do this with tools like the dbatools powershell modules. But, Microsoft decided that they wanted to make this process slightly easier for us.

How is a contained Availability Group different?

Contained AGs add a third server category, the Listener. This is what users will usually see and connect to; they won’t connect to the nodes separately. This listener also contains all of the server level objects, so you no longer have to do things like sync your agent jobs and logins across your nodes manually.

There are some things to consider. Such as, agent jobs will only run on the primary node at all times. If you want them to run on the secondary then you will have to install it on the nodes directly and avoid the contained AG.

The Bug: Transaction Log Shipping

The reason for this blog post is the bug that was mentioned at the beginning. In this scenario, we have a customer with a contained AG that has log shipping involved.

To quickly summarize: log shipping is the act of taking transaction log backups on a server and restoring them elsewhere to make a read-only copy of the original database. In this scenario, the logs are shipped to a server that processes reporting workloads so that this workload does not happen on the main production servers.

Once we set up transaction log shipping in place, we will have three Agent jobs:

• LSBackup_DatabaseName: This will happen on the primary node (or the listener in the case of a contained AG) and performs the transaction log backup.
• LSCopy_DatabaseName: This is installed on the recipient of the log shipped data; in this scenario, the reporting server. This finds all of the log backups that have happened within LSBackup and copies them over to the target server.
• LSRestore_DatabaseName: This uses the local log backups and restores them to the local copy of the database.

Contained AGs absolutely support transaction log shipping. It works much better as you don’t have to manage the primary/secondary server relationship at all. However, we wouldn’t all be here if it was all butterflies and roses, would we?

When you set up log shipping using the GUI you will need several pieces of information to get to the right place. This includes things like backup paths for shared folders, server names, etc. Our specific bug is all about the server names.

The problem occurred when, for patching, a planned failover of the AG happened. This caused the LSBackup job to begin failing. This meant that there were no files to copy over, and therefore the reporting database began falling behind with data. With no backups, it also caused the transaction log to increase in size.

The specific error we began getting was this (GUID is a placeholder for an actual GUID):

Error: Could not retrieve backup settings for primary ID ‘GUID’

Which is odd in a contained AG, as technically the primary node never changes (it’s always the listener).

We then see, upon the built-in retry logic, the following error:

Error: Failed to connect to server “SECONDARY NODE”

Which it shouldn’t be trying to do at all.

I scripted out the log shipping configuration and the only server names involved were the listener and the reporting server. I didn’t see any reference to a specific node, so I went digging.

By looking at the LSBackup agent job, we could see that, for some reason, it had been generated with the server name of the primary node at the point of the log shipping being set up:

This was the source of the issue. It was trying to read backup information from a secondary database, which it was unable to do. It was therefore failing on log backups. I have no idea why it would have chosen this server. This is now something we’re going to build into all of our checks moving forward.

Fixing the Bug

The fix is simple: Change this job manually to look at the listener and execute the agent job. It will likely take a lot longer than it usually would as it’s backing up a lot more data than normal. However, once complete, the LSCopy and LSRestore jobs will do their job and get the target database up to date.

Hopefully this helps anybody in a similar situation, feel free to reach out if you have any specific questions at all around any of this. I’d be more than happy to have a chat about log shipping in contained availability groups.

The post A Bug: Log Shipping in Contained Availability Groups appeared first on SQL Solutions Group.