Over the past few weeks in the AutomateSQL Insiders Community, we've been discussing SQL Server patching.  More specifically patching Availability Groups in a rolling fashion.  This technique keeps your replicas up to date while maintaining minimal downtime.  Automated patching is nothing new.  ...

Service management is a pretty common task for both DBAs and Windows administrators.  If you're like me, you've spent countless hours remoting into servers just to check the status of a service or to manually restart it.  Perhaps you've needed to disable a service briefly while troubleshooting or...

Windows patching is usually a topic left for Windows administrators.  But what if, as a DBA, you're tasked with patching both the OS and SQL Server?  That scenario is common in smaller or cross-functional IT teams where boundaries between roles aren't so clear.  DBAs can't ignore OS patching for ...

My Early Challenges with Ansible on Windows When I was getting started with Ansible back in 2017, I ran into issue after issue.  Coming from a Windows background, trying to use a tool that was primarily used on Linux meant there was little documentation to reference.  You might be saying, "Why d...

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...