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Month: November 2015

Extended Properties

Published 2015-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shows extended properties:

Once I click Properties, I get a dialog with a lot of items on the left. The bottom one is for Extended Properties, with a simple add/edit/delete grid. Here I can see the property(ies) I’ve added.

However this is cumbersome for me. I’d much rather find a way to query the information, which is what I need to do with an application of some sort. I’d think sp_help would work, but it doesn’t.

Extended properties, like Service Broker, was a great idea that floundered because there was never a good UI.  Given how much fighting Steve has to do to see one object’s properties, it’s no wonder they’re so relatively unused.  And that’s a shame, because with the right tooling, they can be a great way of documenting data structures.

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One Step Closer

Published 2015-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Angela Henry shows us that SQL Server Data Tools is kinda-sorta integrated directly into Visual Studio’s installation now:

Next I wanted to see if you got all these same project types with an install of Visual Studio. They announced at Summit that “SSDT” would now be “included” with Visual Studio. So I went out and downloaded Visual Studio (CTP3, Community Edition, i.e., free) from here. And look what shows up on the install features list, there it is in black and white, Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools, almost too good to be true.

Well, we all know that if something seems too good to be true, then it usually is. This is no exception.  Let’s see if you can pick out the reason for my disappointment in the picture below.

It’s one step closer, at least.

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More On Temporal Tables

Published 2015-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West has another nice post on temporal tables, in which he lets the cat out of the bag:

Look at the log records. They are identical to before. In fact, because a trigger is called in the same implicit transaction as the UPDATE statement, we didn’t even need to wrap the INSERT statement in a transaction.

What have we learned?

Temporal tables are doing exactly what an update or delete trigger (or stored procedure) would do, based on what we saw in the log records.

This is an in-depth look at what, exactly, is happening when temporal tables get updated.

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PowerShell-Based Health Checks

Published 2015-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Omid Afzalalghom discusses an open-source tool using PowerShell to read various DMVs and give you a basic health check:

PowerShell is an ideal tool for doing health-checks of a collection of SQL Server instances, and there are several examples around, but few acknowledge the fact that individual DBAs have their own priorities for tests, and need something easily changed to suit circumstances. Omid’s Healthcheck allows tests to be SQL or PowerShell and requires only adding, altering or deleting files in directories.

Grab the tool from his GitHub repo.

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The Future Of Datazen

Published 2015-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria is thinking about the future of Datazen now that Microsoft has acquired them:

This new report manager means the current administration of Datazen (hubs and dashboard groups, etc.) will likely change to conform to more of the SSRS or Power BI paradigms.  As far as I know, there aren’t yet solid details on exactly how this will work. In the Microsoft-led sessions at PASS Summit, they also mentioned that there will be migration tools for those already using Datazen that want to take advantage of this new platform.
So if you are considering Datazen but were worried about its future, there is no need to worry. If you are implementing Datazen now, you can feel better about enhancement and upgrade opportunities with the promised migration tool.

Click through for a hypnotizing animated GIF.  Seriously, I needed to close the window after a couple of minutes because I kept watching it over and over and over.

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Starting And Stopping Local Instances

Published 2015-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin shows ways to simplify starting and stopping SQL Server services on local instances:

Step 3: Easily Stop SQL Server Service.

That is very possible you performed some very heavy and memory intense operation by your local SQL Server instance and it ate all your free memory. You do not need it anymore, but SQL Server won’t easily give memory back.
The easiest way to claim all your memory is to stop your SQL Server.
There are some easy ways doing it:
– First way us using SQL Server Management Studio. You just have to do a right click on your local SQL Server instance and choose “Stop”.

The use case for Slava’s advice is a scenario in which you have SQL Server installed on a local machine with very little RAM.

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Partition Elimination

Published 2015-11-19 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little talks partition elimination:

Working with table partitioning can be puzzling. Table partitioning isn’t always a slam dunk for performance: heavy testing is needed. But even getting started with the testing can be a bit tricky!

Here’s a (relatively) simple example that walks you through setting up a partitioned table, running a query, and checking if it was able to get partition elimination.

I would have snipped the tl;dr section but it was too long…

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MDX On DirectQuery

Published 2015-11-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes a look at MDX querying in SQL Server 2016 Tabular models:

There were a lot of limitations when using DirectQuery in SSAS Tabular 2012/4, but for me the showstopper was the fact that it only worked if you were running DAX queries against your model. Historically the only major client tool that generated DAX queries to get data was Power View, and Power View was/is too limited for serious use, so that alone meant that none of my customers were interested in using DirectQuery. Although we now have Power BI Desktop and PowerBI.com, which also generate DAX queries, the fact remains that the vast majority of business users will still prefer to use Excel PivotTables as their primary client tool – and Excel PivotTables generate MDX queries. So, support for MDX queries in DirectQuery mode in SSAS 2016 means that Excel users will now be able to query a Tabular model in DirectQuery mode. This, plus the performance improvements made to the SQL generated in DirectQuery mode, means that it’s now a feature worth considering in scenarios where you have too much data for SSAS Tabular’s native in-memory engine to handle or where you need to see real-time results.

Good stuff.  Read the whole post, especially if (unlike me) you know a thing or two about MDX.

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