How do I install Ansible on Windows? This is a common question for those of you who are just getting started with Ansible or are curious about how to use it from a Windows machine. When I talk about installing Ansible, I'm referring to installing the Ansible control node—the machine from which ...

Many of us, Windows Admins and DBAs struggle with automation. We often cobble together PowerShell and T-SQL scripts to manage our environments, or worse, we remote into machines to perform repetitive tasks manually.  These approaches create problems: Scripts become difficult to maintain Docum...

Windows Server 2025 includes OpenSSH—no need to install additional software.  However, you need to configure it before you can use it.  In this post, I'll show you how to use Ansible and key-based authentication to connect to and manage Windows Server 2025. Prerequisites: OpenSSH is installed b...

SQL Server Management Studio 21 (Preview) was announced last week at PASS Data Community Summit 2024.  It has some cool new features that are available in the preview.   You can check those out here. If you're familiar with Ansible, you know how easy it is to deploy software. I'll share a playb...

Edition: Saturday, August 3rd, 2024 A few weeks ago I needed to configure replication between two SQL Server 2022 named instances, on separate networks.  In this configuration, the publisher would push data to the subscriber and all related replication jobs would reside at the publisher.   It's...

Edition: Saturday, July 13th, 2024 On July 9th, 2024, Microsoft released a GDR update for multiple editions of SQL Server.  As a DBA, you may be planning how to install this update in your lower environments (DEV, QA, UAT, etc.), tested, and then deploy to production. However, you may have also...

Edition: Saturday, July 6th, 2024 As you begin creating playbooks to automate your work, you'll soon discover they can become many 100s of lines of YAML.  Ansible Roles, allow you to group tasks, variables, handlers, and other artifacts.  Today, I'll focus on an example role I've built and used...

Edition: Saturday, June 29th, 2024 Storing passwords in plain text files is a big problem.  Such as the SA password when working with SQL Server.   But how do you automate the installation of SQL Server and store the password securely? If you're using Ansible, it's easy.   Let's jump in.  Wha...

Edition: Saturday, June 22nd, 2024 SQL Server's configuration files can be a little daunting at first glance.  There are over 50 options which can be set.  Usually, these are supplied when using the installation wizard.  But, what if you needed to automate the installation of SQL Server?  That's...

Edition: Saturday, June 15th, 2024 No one wants to build a new SQL Server instance, release it to production, and immediately request a maintenance window to fix a configuration issue. Has this ever happened to you before?  I've experienced it a few times, and it doesn't reflect well on the DBA...