A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Amanda Ibrahim answers a customer request:
If the customer needs to configure auto scaling for SQL Managed Instance, where the vCores can be increase and decrease automatically on specific time.
Read on to learn how. This can be useful for dev environments or places where your use case has “office hours”—that is, 90% of your activity takes place during a block of 4-12 hours—and you can afford the time in which the service is unavailable due to scaling.
Comments closedLee Markum helps out people new to SQL Server:
I see a lot of questions on data related Reddit forums and data science groups on LinkedIn about how to get started with SQL. Certainly these people mean that they want to learn the SQL language. I don’t think you can do that long term without setting up a home lab. You need your own place to experiment beyond what you can do in an online tutorial where you’re typing into a web browser, for example.
By the time you finish this post, you will be able to install SQL Server for use as a home lab for learning T-SQL and administration of the server environment.
Click through for a step-by-step guide. There’s a lot to learn after walking through this guide but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Comments closedAjay Dwivedi performs a server health check:
Working as a DBA, I often get pulled into issues where application teams complain about “database server is slow”.
This general statement “server is slow” requires an equally robust approach that can help us figure out if there is an issue with CPU, memory, io, or regressed query. At this point, I prefer to use my SQLMonitor dashboard. This tool is entirely free and open source, and can be deployed on SQL Server 2014+ irrespective of any environment or edition.
Read on to see how it works and check out the GitHub repo as well as a one-off script you can run if you don’t have SQLMonitor set up.
Comments closedMichael J. Swart diagnoses issues when the Windows registry slows down operations:
I want to describe some symptoms that SQL Server may display when its Windows Registry is non-responsive or slow. From the symptoms, it’s hard to know that it’s a slow registry and so if a web search brought you here, hopefully this helps.
Read on for some of the various operations which request data from the registry, as well as thoughts from Michael on some of the effects of a slow registry. It sounds like there’s not a whole lot we can do about it and this is rare.
1 CommentGrant Fritchey makes a recommendation:
Chocolatey, as it says on the web site, is a package manager for Windows. But what does that mean? Basically, a package manager is a central place to install, upgrade and remove software. You get a database of the software you have installed, then it can help you to manage your software. Package managers are built into most operating systems. For example, apt or yum on a Linux box. However, not Windows. That’s where Chocolatey comes in.
I do like Chocolatey a lot as well and not just on VMs that I regularly need to rebuild.
Comments closedWarwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-enabled data services:
Now that we have our Azure Arc-enabled Data Controller configured and available, we can now deploy our first Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance into our environment. As previously mentioned depending on the type of configuration required for your environment with your Arc-enabled Data Controller (Directly connected or Indirectly connected modes) this will dictate the approach available for you to setup / configure your Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.
Click through for a step-by-step guide.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher ran into an interesting issue:
One of my co-workers came to me the other day and told me that they found their network id as a login on one of our SQL Server instances. Why is that note worthy? We make a point of using AD groups if at all possible. He did a little bit more work and tracked it down to a series of commands that he had run recently. I’ll be honest with you, this was starting to feel like a couple of other cases where I’ve seen database objects and principals show up unexpectedly. One was when I created a database object without setting a default schema, and the other was when I created a database audit specification to audit a user that didn’t have an associated database principal (access was through an AD group).
This time around, it was creating a server role. Read on for Kenneth’s thoughts and how you can avoid accidentally creating logins for individual Active Directory users.
Comments closedWe received some support cases when customers encounter the error below while trying to add an AAD security group to their Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL managed instance. In this blog article, we will be listing a few points to be checked to troubleshoot this error and can help you to identify the cause.
Msg 33130, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Principal ‘XXXXXX’ could not be found or this principal type is not supported.
Read on for several reasons why things might be going wrong.
Comments closedPeriodic index analysis for SQL Server typically involves tasks such as checking for missing/unused/overlapping indexes, checking for heaps that maybe should have been designed with a clustered index, analyzing ROW/PAGE compression, etc. There are numerous DMVs that you can use as a starting point for those tasks. There’s also some good open source tools and scripts that members of the SQL Server community have created and shared. One task that I don’t recall ever seeing was an analysis of INCLUDE columns for nonclustered indexes. What I really wanted to do was to find INCLUDE columns that were never being used, and remove them from index definitions.
Click through to see what Dave learned, as well as the repo containing several useful scripts.
Comments closedAndrea Allred runs into a weird issue on AWS RDS:
We tracked down every job that was touching the server and started to tune it, thinking that was just pushing us over the edge. We worked with AWS and finally one of our engineers noticed that our MAX Server Memory Setting was back at the SQL default. You know that insane default? Yes, it was there. But we had properly set that…three months ago when this stack was put in place.
Click through for the entire story, including symptoms and resolution.
Comments closed