Production SQL Server Engineering
Operational notes, diagnostics, and real‑world SQL Server practices from large‑scale production environments.
Focused on reliability, observability, HA/DR, performance, and day‑to‑day operations under real pressure. Everything here comes from actual incidents, real workloads, and the things DBAs check first when systems break.
What You’ll Find Here
Practical SQL Server engineering content designed for people who already run production systems:
- Troubleshooting workflows and incident response patterns
- Operational runbooks and repeatable DBA processes
- Performance diagnostics and evidence‑driven analysis
- Backup, recovery, and HA/DR guidance
- Production‑safe scripts and tooling
- Notes from real outages, real fixes, and real lessons learned
- Practical AI usage examples for DBAs, using AI to make operational work faster and more efficient
This site is written for engineers who care about correctness, reliability, and understanding what’s actually happening under the hood.
SQL Server Guides
Incident response, failovers, backup failures, login and connectivity issues. Production troubleshooting and recovery.
Reliability Engineering
Availability Groups, latency analysis, storage design, performance tuning, and HA/DR architecture.
DBA Scripts
Production-safe SQL Server scripts for diagnostics, monitoring, security checks, and auditing.
Latest Posts
🤖 AI in SQL Server Engineering
A growing area of the site focused on practical, production‑safe AI usage for MSSQL DBAs. Not theory. Not hype. Actual workflows that make engineers faster and more effective:
- Summarising long incident timelines
- Extracting signal from noisy SQL Server logs
- Drafting runbooks and operational templates
- Generating repeatable T‑SQL patterns
- Explaining execution plans and wait profiles
- Turning raw monitoring output into actionable steps
AI won’t replace engineering judgement – but it will make day‑to‑day operations more efficient. This section will expand over time as the tooling and patterns mature.
Explore AI for SQL Server DBAs
MSSQL TOOLS
Featured Toolkit: dba-tools
A lightweight, production‑ready toolkit for SQL Server operations and diagnostics.
Built for speed, signal, and copy/paste into SSMS during real incidents.
Includes:
- High‑signal T‑SQL diagnostics for waits, blocking, I/O, memory, CPU
- AG health checks and operational helpers
- Backup/restore verification and environment checks
- Inventory and metadata discovery
- Evidence‑oriented output for incident response
- Clean folder structure for fast navigation
- This is the toolkit I use daily in production environments.
Browse mssql-tools →
More About Me
I’m a SQL Server DBA working in large-scale production environments, working remotely from home in Edinburgh, Scotland.
My focus is on reliability, performance, and keeping systems running when they matter most. Most of my day-to-day work sits around operations, incident response, platform engineering, and automation, supporting SQL Server workloads that need to stay available and predictable under real pressure.
For more background and non‑DBA writing, visit my personal site at peterwhyte.com, where you’ll also find my CV.
