Ansible's inventory file is fundamental for defining and organizing the servers to be managed in a SQL Server Availability Group.  It serves as the "address book" for Ansible to use when patching these instances. 

Next up are roles. 

We'll build an example role as part of this blog series (disclai...

In my previous post, we explored the concept of rolling updates for SQL Server Availability Groups and how Ansible can transform this complex process into a streamlined, repeatable operation. We discussed the benefits of automation and outlined a high-level strategy for implementing this approach.

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.  You...

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 playbook...

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 be...

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 ex...

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 to...

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. 

What i...

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 wh...

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 te...

Edition: Saturday, June 8th, 2024

Are you familiar with the terms DevOps and Platform Engineering?  DevOps is the process of consistently and reliably deploying applications into production environments.  Platform Engineering focuses on building and maintaining the foundational infrastructure and t...

Edition: Saturday, April 27th, 2024

Over the past several weeks we've implemented a CA, generated a certificate, and enabled SQL Server network encryption.  We validated encryption was being used via the sys.dm_exec_connections dmv.  This week, I'll take the validation one more step by using Wiresh...