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Day: March 7, 2016

Fix SQLPS

Published 2016-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire wants Microsoft to fix three things with SQLPS:

SQLPS has a lot of of bugs that need to be addressed (I’ll get to that soon), but I propose we start with these three.

  1. SQLPS module is slow to load
  2. Loading SQLPS module changes current directory to PS SQLSERVER:\>
  3. SQLPS module uses unapproved PowerShell verbs

Each item even has suggested fixes. The fixes are pretty straightforward (said the DBA who doesn’t do QA). Bugs 1 and 2 suggest modifying a few lines in SqlPsPostScript.ps1, while number 3 probably requires a recompile and we’re not really sure how challenging that will be.

Please upvote the Connect items if you use SQLPS…or don’t but would if it worked better.

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Granting Permissions In AGs Or On Mirrors

Published 2016-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Matan Yungman discusses how to grant permissions only to the replica database in a mirroring or Availability Groups scenario:

You work with Database Mirroring or AlwaysOn AG, and you want to make sure your end users work only on the secondary server. How should you do that?

This solution feels a little hacky to me.  There’s enough value in it that I could see companies doing this, but it’d be nice if there were an easier way.

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DBCC UPDATEUSAGE

Published 2016-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin has some information on the DBCC UPDATEUSAGE command:

As you can see, UPDATEUSAGE found three problems with that table, while was running in “ESTIMATEONLY” mode. When it run in “Fix” mode it also found and fixed only three problems. The number of rows was still left unfixed.

I think it’s fair to say that this is a relatively uncommonly-used DBCC command, but can definitely be useful in a subset of circumstances.

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Plan Explorer Math

Published 2016-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand walks through display differences between SQL Sentry Plan Explorer and SSMS:

Now, in the process of developing Plan Explorer, we have discovered several cases where ShowPlan doesn’t quite get its math correct. The most obvious example is percentages adding up to over 100%; we get this right in cases where SSMS is ridiculously off (I see this less often today than I used to, but it still happens).

Interpreting execution plans is not a trivial exercise, and this is an interesting look at how SQL Sentry developers (and supporters within the broader community) have worked on it through the years.

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Don’t Use Write-Host

Published 2016-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones warns us away from Write-Host in Powershell:

I’ve written a few scripts and programs lately, mostly just for fun. In those scripts, I’ve used Write-Host to return output. To me, it’s been like “Print” in various languages where I can get output of a program. Often I’ll use a method/function to get info and then use print to output that to the caller.

However a few people noted that in my last script, Write-host wasn’t necessary. When I asked why, both Mike Fal and Drew Furgiule responded.

Mike and Drew are smart cookies.  Write-Host has some major limitations which hinder developers’ abilities to modularize and package viable code.

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Columnstore On Temp Objects

Published 2016-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer looks at creating columnstore indexes on temporary objects to see which ones are allowed and what limitations exist:

There is a very usable support for Columnstore Indexes within the temporary objects, but they are not appearing in any of the DMV’s to be analysed or optimised. This is especially sad in the relation to the global temporary tables which are some of the more useful temporary objects.

For the most part, I’d consider these reasonable results.  Hopefully we can get columnstore stats on temp tables, but even that’s not a huge loss.

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