[UPDATED] In March 2026, our production messaging-database cluster started crashing again. Same exception code as the incident we resolved last year (0xc0000005, Access Violation), but a different stack signature, different servers, different cloud, and ultimately a completely different root cause. This time the bug wasn't in SQL Server. It wasn't in the storage drivers. It wasn't in our queries. It was in something we'd never have suspected without comparing the crashing ser

On public speaking, the age of AI, and why I finally stopped making excuses. There's a photo of me on a conference room screen. Batik shirt, arms crossed, smiling — probably more confident than I actually felt in that moment. "AI-Enhanced CI/CD Workflow for SQL Server, Renz Bagasbas, Senior Database Administrator." I stared at that slide for a few seconds before I walked up. Took a breath. And then I spoke. That probably sounds like nothing. For a lot of people, it is nothing

[UPDATED] There's a principle that stuck with me recently. The core idea was simple: stop describing what you want to build — start building it. If you can explain what you want clearly enough, AI can build it. But the catch is that "clearly enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Without structure, AI coding tools produce confident-looking output that quietly falls apart. They ignore your conventions, invent patterns you didn't ask for, and generate code th

In late October 2025, our production SQL Server 2022 Enterprise cluster running on AWS EC2 started crashing repeatedly with Access Violation (0xc0000005) exceptions. This wasn't just any database going down — this cluster is the heart of the business. It powers the core platform that our customers depend on every day: real-time communications services, call routing, messaging, and the APIs that integrate with everything downstream. When this database cluster goes offline, the

It was a regular Thursday afternoon. The kind where you're wrapping up tasks, maybe thinking about what to have for dinner. And then, at 4:36 PM, the alerts started rolling in. Transaction processing delays. Partial database inaccessibility. The production database cluster — the one that powers core services for an entire region — was going down. Not because of a hardware failure. Not because someone fat-fingered a config change. But because of something far more subtle: a gh

How default SQL Server configuration brought a production server to its knees — and how two settings fixed it in under a minute. The Escalation It started with a message from my manager: Attached was a screenshot of CPU pinned near 100%. Not a good look on a production server handling live traffic. The Investigation My first instinct was to hunt for a rogue query. That's usually the culprit — some poorly optimized SELECT statement doing a full table scan, or a report running

[UPDATED] Database deployments have always been the weak link in most CI/CD pipelines. Application code gets automated pipelines, blue-green deployments, and rollback strategies from day one. Databases? They still get a DBA manually executing scripts, a process that doesn't scale, burns productive hours, and leaves too much room for human error. That workflow needs to be automated, but done carefully, because a bad database deployment can do far more damage than a bad applica

[UPDATED] One of the major projects I was tasked with in my current role involved solving two persistent issues: Build a redundant Numbering Lookup microservice used by multiple applications. The requirement? It must read from secondary, asynchronous, read-only replicas of NumberingDB, distributed across several regions (DC2, DC3, DC4). The primary source of truth remains NumberingDB in DC1, and our service must only query its regional replicas. Replace SQL Replication for

The first six weeks in a new DBA role are often a blur, equal parts learning, adjusting, and firefighting. There’s a lot to take in:...

Earlier, in Week 3, I had explored Glenn Berry’s Diagnostic Queries and Microsoft’s Best Practices Checker . Both of those do give some...

Not too long after we reconfigured SQL Server's memory, we expected to see the pressure drop. We did see some improvement, fewer flushes,...

By automating sp_WhoIsActive and deploying it across all our production SQL Servers, I’ve built a pretty reliable, near-real-time view of...

For Week Four, I've put up the work in a more systematic way. If Week Three was about collecting baselines, Week Four is about using that...

In Part 1 of this Week 3 dive into SQL Server baselining, I used Invoke-DbaDiagnosticQuery from dbatools to run Glenn Berry’s diagnostic...

Week three goal was pretty starightforward: Baselining a critical task to ensure our SQL Server instances are running smoothly. To gather...

The first week marked the beginning of my journey in this new role. I spent that first stretch getting my bearings meeting the team,...

Updated: Just added some new resources under "My Essential SQL Tools" that should be more useful. I recently stepped into a new chapter...