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Day: October 26, 2016

Restoring An Azure SQL Database

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post on restoring a database in Azure SQL Database:

You will need to select your restore point as well.  In this case, I decided to restore back to midnight UTC on a particular date.  Note that the dates are UTC rather than your local timezone!

After selecting your restore point, you pick the target server and can decide a couple of things.  First, you can put this database into an elastic database pool, which makes cross-database connections a lot easier.  Second, you can choose a different pricing tier.  Because I only needed this database for a few minutes, keeping it at P2 Premium was fine; the total restore time meant that we spent less than a dollar bringing the data back to its pristine condition.

Be aware of the time for restoration; it can be very slow.

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SQL Server ODBC For Linux 13.0

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Meet Bhagdev reports that a new version of the SQL Server ODBC driver for Linux is available:

What’s new

  • Native Linux Install Experience: The driver can now be installed with apt-get (Ubuntu), yum (RedHat/CentOS) and Zypper (SUSE). Instructions on how to do this is below.

  • AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AG): The driver now supports transparent connections to AlwaysOn Availability Groups. The driver quickly discovers the current AlwaysOn topology of your server infrastructure and connects to the current active server transparently.

  • TLS 1.2 support: The driver now supports TLS 1.2 connections to SQL Server.

These are some nice additions.  None of them are groundbreaking, but they add up to a nice release.  Click through for instructions on how to install the driver; it got a lot easier for supported platforms.

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Power BI Integrates With SSRS

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley discusses a brand new announcement:

What am I most excited about as I prepare for the PASS Summit here in Seattle this week?  A lot of things.  Preparing for my session, which will be on Thursday at 1:30, by far the most popular and interesting topics are about integration and tool choice.  Today’s public announcement on the SSRS product team blog about on-premises Power BI integration with Reporting Services is really big news.  It’s great to see two of the technologies I love working together.  Whether in the cloud or on-premises, Power BI and Reporting Services can be used together.

It’s hard to overstate how huge this is.  Plenty of companies want the reporting that Power BI offers, but have security or software policies in place which prevented Power BI adoption.  Having it render through Reporting Services means that end users don’t need to have Power BI Desktop and that the data and reports remain entirely on-prem.

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A Better Get-SQLErrorLog

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele steps up with an improved version of Get-SQLErrorLog:

It doesn’t have to be so bad, though, because we can make it better. In my mind, my perfect error log cmdlet should:

  1. Be usable when a SQL Server instance is down, and
  2. Be relatively quick, and
  3. Parse error messages by number, severity, and state, and
  4. Incorporate date/time range filtering, and
  5. Return an object

What’s that, you say? You want to solve each of these and write our own, better cmdlet? I got you, fam. At the bottom of this blog post you’ll find my code, and you can skip ahead if you don’t care about the “hows” or “whys” of what you’ll be looking at.

Very nice work Drew did in putting this together.

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Regular Expressions In Lucene

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little looks at Azure Search searches:

I wanted to be able to find all architect jobs using something like ‘%rchit%’ as well, because there’s not a lot of great ways to do this in SQL Server.

In SQL Server, you can use a traditional B-Tree index to seek, but only based on the letters at the beginning of a character column.  If I want to know every business title that contains ‘%rchit%’, I’m going to have to scan an entire index.

SQL Server fulltext indexes don’t solve the double-wildcard problem, either. Fulltext indexes support word prefix searches– so a fulltext index would be great at finding all job titles that contain a word that starts with ‘Arch%’.

Sometimes that’s enough. But a lot of times, you do need to find a substring anywhere in a word. And sometimes you do want to offload that from your database.

This is the kind of problem Lucene (and its follow-up implementations, like Elasticsearch) was designed to solve.  Read on for more details as Kendra solves the problem in Azure Search.

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Testing Analysis Services Cubes

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard shows how to test Analysis Services cubes using a Visual Studio test project:

Unit testing in Visual Studio is actually not that hard and can save you a lot pain down the road. The testing framework in Visual Studio offers extensive ways of executing batches of tests. You can group tests by Class, Duration, Outcome, Trait or Project.

When you right-click a test, you get the option to select how you want the tests in the Test Explorer to be grouped.

If you have an Analysis Services cube, definitely read this—testing is a vital part of software development, and automating tests can save you significant time later.

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Memory-Optimized Columnstore

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer clears the air regarding memory-optimized columnstore tables:

I would like to dedicate this blog post to the Memory-Optimised (also known and LOVED as Hekaton) Columnstore Indexes and their limitations in SQL Server 2016.
Disclaimer: the Memory-Optimised Technology is the ground-breaking development, which will be truly appreciated only in the next couple of years, and it has its incredible use cases (and maybe I will be blogging more about this space in the next couple of months), but people needs to understand that mapping InMemory Columnstore Indexes to disk-based Columnstore Indexes 1:1 is a very wrong idea, and that because InMemory technology is significantly younger and less stable than Columnstore Indexes – there are some very significant hidden cornerstones.

It’s important to read this post as “this is not yet a fully-mature product” rather than “this will always be worse.”  But it’s just as important to understand the limitations of the product and not think you’re getting something that you aren’t.

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Analysis Services In Azure

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb looks at SSAS in Azure:

Support for multidimensional models will be considered for a future release, based on customer demand.

I’m pretty sure there there will be plenty of demand for Multidimensional support given the installed base that’s out there.

I hope so.  Lack of multidimensional isn’t a deal-killer, but it’s a deal-harmer.

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Growing Speakers

Published 2016-10-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun wants to plant speaker seeds:

This month’s topic is going to be about Speaking & Presenting with a focus on Helping New Speakers! 4 short years ago, I attended my very first PASS Summit and never did I think I’d ever dare to become a Speaker and present. But a year later, I got coerced into a lightning talk. Since then, I’ve presented at several dozen User Groups & SQL Saturdays. Tomorrow, I have the honor of presenting at PASS Summit 2016! And what an adventure it’s been!

For T-SQL Tuesday, I am giving differing topics if you are currently a Speaker or have never have spoken. And if you’ve never spoken, this T-SQL Tuesday comes with a challenge and a twist.

I think this is a wonderful idea.

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