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Day: October 24, 2016

Minimal Logging With Columnstore

Published 2016-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer continues his columnstore series by looking at columnstore insert logging in SQL Server 2016 versus 2014:

Ladies and gentlemen! That’s quite a difference to SQL Server 2014!
We better check the total length of the transaction log to see the final result: 384.032 bytes! Ok, that is significantly more than for the rowstore heap table for sure, but what about the comparison to the SQL Server 2014 ? Did this minimal logging bring any improvement ?
Well … 🙂
In SQL Server 2014 we had 1.255.224 bytes spent on the transaction log – meaning over 1.2 MB, meaning around 3 times more, for the Delta-Store insertion! For such a simple table, this is a huge improvement, but let’s take a look at the total length of the transaction log entries in both environments (SQL Server 2014 & SQL Server 2016)

This is worth a careful read.  If you’ve spent time working with 2014 clustered columnstore indexes, there are a few changes which might affect you.  The most interesting thing for me was that the deltastore is no longer page compressed.

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Automatic Variables In Powershell

Published 2016-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Constantine Kokkinos has a list of automatic variables in Powershell:

Been a few days of learning since I last wrote one of these, but I have come back to the automatic variables page on the PowerShell documentation enough times that I think I should just blog the important parts for myself.

  • $? – TRUE/FALSE if the last thing you did succeeded.

  • $_ – Something everyone uses in posh, current pipeline object.

  • $Args – all the undeclared params passed to a function, try to avoid.

  • $Error – the array of error objects that represent a stack of the most recent errors. use $Errors0 to get the most recent error.

Read on for more variables.

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Upgrading SSMS

Published 2016-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates argues that you should upgrade to the latest version of Management Studio:

SSMS is supported for managing SQL Server 2008 through 2016 (except for SSIS instances which sadly still require a version-specific SSMS at the time of this writing). If you manage numerous servers on different versions, this unification is fantastic. There is partial support for managing pre-2008 instances. And, of course as you’d expect, the newest SSMS release supports various new features in SQL Server 2016 such as Query Statistics, Live Query Plans, Compare Showplan, Security Policies for row-level security, and so on with all the new 2016 goodies we have.

SSMS also supports managing Azure components such as Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse, as well as hybrid cloud features such as StretchDB and Backup to URL. This additional unification is really, really handy.

I have a copy of SSMS 16 for reading Query Store, but not all of my plugins have been updated yet, so I’m still living in SSMS 2014 for now.

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Pre-Model Scripts

Published 2016-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Richie Lee discusses what makes for a good pre-model script in an SSDT project:

Idempotent: big word, and is used in maths. But don’t let that put you off. What it means in this context is that a script can be re-run and the same result happens. So in the context of altering a primary key, the pseudo-code would look something like this:

if database exists then
if table exists then
if primary key name eq “oldname” then
drop primary key then
add primary key with “newname”

I’m a huge fan of idempotent scripts.  Releases become so much easier when you can guarantee that you can re-run the scripts, and idempotence is a necessary property of continuous integration.

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