When migrating SQL Server instances, one of the most error-prone steps is transferring SQL logins to the destination. Simply scripting a login with CREATE LOGIN … WITH PASSWORD won’t preserve the original password hash or the original SID — and mismatched SIDs between instance logins and database users will break application connectivity even if the…

Moving SQL Server databases to a new volume — whether to rebalance I/O across storage, migrate to faster disks, or reclaim space — requires a methodical approach to avoid downtime surprises. The detach/attach method is the fastest option when you can afford a brief offline window: no backup involved, no network transfer overhead. This metascript…

When the daily backup history is too granular for a high-level capacity planning overview, a monthly view gives a cleaner picture of long-term growth trends. This query aggregates backup data from msdb..backupset by month, taking the peak size reached in each month to calculate the net monthly change. This complements the daily report: use the…

Capacity planning starts with understanding how your databases grow over time. The simplest source of historical size data in SQL Server is the backup catalog: msdb..backupset records information about every backup taken on the instance. If you don’t have a dedicated monitoring tool, this is a reliable starting point. Two important caveats before using this…