Anthony Nocentino's Blog

I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates HammerDB benchmarking for SQL Server using Docker.

Ten years ago today, I filmed a Pluralsight Play by Play on open source PowerShell.

Yesterday I gave a talk for MSSQLTips called “Building a DBA Agent for Your SQL Server Estate”.

I’ve been running this blog on Hugo for a long time, and like most blogs with real history, it’s accumulated some tech debt.

I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something I’ve wanted for a long time.

It’s that time of year again!

Here’s the scenario: one of my SQL Server instances migrated to the DR array.

I’m honored to announce that I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the tenth consecutive year, recognized in the Azure SQL and SQL Server technical areas under Data Platform.

I’ve been working on a project that combines two things I spend a lot of time with: MongoDB sharded clusters and Everpure FlashArrays.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually takes to make an AI agent genuinely useful for database work, both for administration and for application access to the data tier.

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to the SQL Server OS.

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, most of what I’ve covered requires SQL Server to participate in the snapshot: the write IO freeze, the metadata backup, the coordinated workflow.

I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both as a consultant and now in my work at Everpure, and I see the same patterns over and over.

In my planned failover walkthrough, I showed what happens when you deliberately move the primary role to another replica.

When building the sql-on-k8s-operator, I wanted to make sure it could handle both planned and unplanned failovers.

I’ve been doing a deep dive into SQL Server on-disk structures lately, and one of my favorite rabbit holes is revisiting Paul Randal’s series on file header pages.

Are you considering replatforming your SQL Server workload due to recent vendor changes, but still need high availability and disaster recovery?

Good news for anyone who’s been working around the AVX issue I wrote about in my previous post.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably been following Microsoft’s announcement about native NVMe support in Windows Server 2025 with great interest.

Update (February 2, 2026): Microsoft has fixed this issue in SQL Server 2025 CU1.

Introduction When you’re running MongoDB at scale with data distributed across multiple Pure Storage FlashArrays, achieving truly consistent backups becomes a critical and interesting technical challenge.

In my previous post, I showed you how to build a snapshot backup catalog using SQL Server 2025’s new native REST API integration.

Update for SQL Server 2025: This post and the GitHub repo have been updated for SQL Server 2025 RC1 and Ubuntu 24.04.

SQL Server 2025 introduces native support for vector data types and external AI models.

I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates HammerDB benchmarking for SQL Server using Docker.

In modern IT environments, not all workloads require the same level of storage performance, protection, or cost.

Ollama SQL FastStart streamlines the deployment of SQL Server 2025 with integrated AI capabilities through a comprehensive Docker-based solution.

When managing storage infrastructure at scale, one of the most powerful approaches is treating related storage resources as cohesive Workloads rather than individual components.

I am honored to announce that I have been renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the ninth consecutive year, recognized in the Azure SQL and SQL Server technical areas under Data Platform.

I’m really excited to share some new functionality in SQL Server 2025 combined with some innovations in FlashArray’s REST API.

I’m excited to share a new open-source project I’ve been working on that combines two of my favorite areas: SQL Server and Pure Storage FlashArray performance monitoring.

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new compression algorithm called ZSTD (Zstandard), which can enhance database backup performance.

In this post, I’ll walk you through a T-SQL script that creates application-consistent snapshots on Pure Storage FlashArray, all from within SQL Server, no external tooling.

With the release of SQL Server 2025, Microsoft is firmly positioning its flagship database platform as an enterprise-ready AI solution.

As AI continues to evolve, many of us are looking for ways to leverage large language models (LLMs) without relying on cloud services.

You can now run powerful LLMs like Llama 3.1 directly on your laptop using Ollama.

In this post, the fifth in our series, I want to illustrate an example of using the T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to seed Availability Groups (AGs) with storage-based snapshots.

Update (February 2026): This post has been updated to reflect the current best practices for monitoring FlashArray using OpenMetrics.

In this post, the fourth in our series, I want to share an example demonstrating SQL Server 2022’s T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in a scenario where a database spans multiple storage arrays.

SQL Server 2025 is an upcoming release focused on AI, analytics, and modern database development, backed by innovations in mission-critical engine features for security, performance, and high availability.

I’ve migrated all presentations content over to GitHub…check it out here!

In this post, the third in our series on using T-SQL Snapshot Backup, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and then perform point-in-time database restores using that snapshot ba…

In this post, the second in our series, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and perform point-in-time database restores using a snapshot backup as the base of the restore.

Traditional SQL Server backups can struggle with large databases, resulting in longer backup times and resource contention.

Welcome back to the fifth installment of our blog series on using the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK2.

We’re working through the major refresh of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator series at Pluralsight!

This post shows you how to install containerd as the container runtime in a Kubernetes cluster.

We’re working through the major refresh of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator series at Pluralsight!

We’re kicking off a major refresh of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator series at Pluralsight!

We’re kicking off a major refresh of my Certified Kubernetes Administrator series at Pluralsight!