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Month: June 2016

In-Memory And Temporal Table Properties

Published 2016-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin has updated his script to include memory-optimized and temporal tables:

There is also new column called “Temporal”. It indicates if a table is System Versioned or it is Historical repository. Row_Count number for Historical repository indicates number of changes done to the main table. That option is applicable only for SQL Server 2016.

I’ve updated only “Ctrl-F1” button, which returns list of tables within a database. Here is the link to the full script archive:https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5yWoyX1eEWqZ3FJUnNHZm80bzQ

Check out his script.

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More Licensing Notes

Published 2016-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni has additional information on licensing for SQL Server 2016:

SQL Server 2016 launched last week to great reviews and with a ton of great new features. I have been working with this version for well over a year now and extremely happy to see it hit RTM and be broadly adopted. So as DBAs it always sucks when you get excited about new features, only to find out the price changed, or vendor “O” made that feature a cost option. So what’s new with SQL Server 2016 licensing? (you won’t this as a session title at any upcoming SQL Server events).  Well first the good news—SQL Server 2016 is the same price and 2012 and 2014 (roughly $6800 core for Enterprise Edition). That’s definitely good news—Microsoft gave us a bunch of new functionality and didn’t raise the price. Additionally, if you see my below post on what is in Standard Edition, they added a lot of functionality there, too.

But we know finance and marketing employees have jobs to do as well, and there is no way they were letting a major version release happen without some changes. So let’s take a look at the one’s Denny Cherry (b|t) and I could glean out of the licensing guide. Please download and read for yourself.

There are a couple of interesting nuances that you’ll want to read up on.

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Changing The SSRS Display Language

Published 2016-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Regis Baccaro shows how to change the user language in SSRS 2016:

Changing it to Spanish and refreshing the browser changed the SSRS user language to Spanish without me having to add a language at all.

To change the user language of SSRS 2016 you need only to change the Formatting Region setting from the control panel – nothing else !

The issue I tend to have with this is that different tools tend to behave differently when you start changing the format settings.  I recall Excel being particularly finicky about it.

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New Diagnostic Queries

Published 2016-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Glenn Berry has a new update of his diagnostic queries, focused around SQL Server 2014 and 2016:

This month, I have several improvements in the SQL Server 2014 and 2016 sets, along with additional comments and documentation in the SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 sets. One new feature is a series of six dashes after each query to make them easier to parse by people who use PowerShell to run the queries and collect the results. I have gotten quite a bit of interest about making a special version of these queries for SQL Database in Microsoft Azure. So, I will be doing that pretty soon.

If you don’t already use Glenn’s queries, I highly recommend them as a starting point in tracking down issues.

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Polybase Row Size Limits

Published 2016-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Manoj Pandey notes that Polybase has a row size limit:

With the error description its quiet evident that the External tables does not support row size more than 32768 bytes. But still I take a look online and found in Azure Documentation that this is a limitation right now with Polybase. The Azure document mentions:

Wide rows support is not supported yet, “If you are using Polybase to load your tables, define your tables so that the maximum possible row size, including the full length of variable length columns, does not exceed 32,767 bytes. While you can define a row with variable length data that can exceed this figure, and load rows with BCP, you will not be be able to use Polybase to load this data quite yet. Polybase support for wide rows will be added soon. Also, try to limit the size of your variable length columns for even better throughput for running queries.”

You can still use varchar(max) and nvarchar(max) for data types (unlike the Hive provider, which has a strict limit of 8000 characters for a single column) but can’t break that 32K mark.

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Power BI + Interactive R Charts

Published 2016-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati shows us how to integrate R charts in the Power BI experience:

In previous videos you’ve learned that we can demonstrate R visualization in Power BI, In this video you will learn how R visualization is working interactively with other elements in Power BI report. In fact Power BI works with R charts as a regular visualization and highlighting and selecting items in other elements of report will effect on that. Here is a quick video about this functionality

Check out the five-minute video.

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Finding Malicious Domains

Published 2016-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Rafael San Miguel Carrasco uses dimensionality reduction to figure out if a domain is malicious:

Dimensionality reduction is a common techique to visualize observations in a dataset, by combining all features into two, that can then be used to draw the observation in an scatter plot.

One popular algorithm that implements this technique is PCA (Principal Components Analysis), which is available in R through the prcomp() function.

The algorithm was applied to observations of sthe dataset, and ggplot2’s geom_point() function was used to draw the results in a 2D chart.

I would want to see this done for a couple hundred thousand domains, but I do like the idea of taking advantage of statistical modeling tools to find security threats.

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XML Includes Tabs And Spaces

Published 2016-06-08 by Kevin Feasel

Sander Stad ran into an error creating a Biml script:

Apparently SSIS doesn’t agree with my code. So opening the editor of the raw file connection, changing the access mode to “File name” showed me this:

There are spaces and tabs in front of the path! SSIS doesn’t work well with spaces and that’s one of the reasons why you should not use spaces in file names in the first place.

This is one of the trickier bits of XML-based languages (like Biml):  spacing inside tags can matter…sometimes…

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