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Day: January 20, 2017

Automating Stats Maintenance With Azure SQL DW

Published 2017-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey shows how to create automated statistics maintenance for an Azure SQL Data Warehouse database:

NOTE: The most important habit you can start with in Azure is putting everything into discrete, planned, Resource Groups. These make management so much easier.

Once the account is set, the first thing you need is to create a Runbook. There is a collection of them for your use within Azure. None of them are immediately applicable for what I need. I’m just writing a really simple Powershell script to do what I want:

Runbooks are an important part of Azure maintenance, and this is a gentle introduction to them.

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Right-Sizing Elastic Pools

Published 2017-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal points out a nice potential money-saving feature with Azure:

The recommendation is to setup a standard 50 EDTU pool. I am convinced that this pool is a new pricing tier. Even though the cost saving is small it is still clever that it suggests this. I assume the analysis done in the background really does understand my utilization patterns as we know that the patterns are absolutely crucial for when using elastic pools so it is something to definitely consider.

Within a click of a button the portal will create it for you.

It’s interesting that the feature can actually save you money rather than just telling you that you need to buy more expensive services.

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The Importance Of Powershell

Published 2017-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill explains why he’s advocating that DBAs learn Powershell:

2 very solid reasons (there are others) that every DBA should be learning and using PowerShell:

1 – Its very useful for admin at the O/S level.

At my current client I am team lead of System and SQL Admins, along with doing any of the work that comes our way.  This means we need to be able to manage the modest server farm we have.  Its big enough that we can’t log onto every server every day, but small enough nobody wants to buy a proper monitoring toolset.  So…PS to the rescue!

Read on for the other reason.  I think the relatively poor Powershell tooling with SQL Server (with respect to other groups like Exchange) limited general acceptance, but they’ve made some big improvements over the past year and there are some sharp minds in the community working to make Powershell even more important for DBAs.

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ApplicationName On Invoke-SqlCmd2

Published 2017-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy improves the Invoke-SqlCmd2 cmdlet:

I decided to change this around so that it no longer uses string formatting, but instead a SqlConnectionStringBuilder. I had a couple reasons for this:

  • It will eliminate redundant code. There are several common elements in each of the ConnectionStrings above. If more complex logic is needed, there are potentially more copies of this ConnectionString kicking around.

  • It’s prone to copy/paste and other editing errors. If there’s a change that affects both versions of the ConnectionString and the developer just copies the line from one branch of the if statement to the other, code will be lost or invalid values will be substituted because of positioning.

This is something I’d like to see make it to the main cmdlet.

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Switching Instead Of Renaming Tables

Published 2017-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little has an interesting solution to when you need to swap out an old table for a new version:

This pattern works in SQL Server 2014 and higher. And it even works in Standard Edition of 2014.

Some folks will see the word ‘Switch’ in this pattern and assume the pattern that I’m suggesting is Enterprise Edition only for versions before SQL Server 2016 SP1.

However, oddly enough, you can use partition switching even in Standard Edition, as long as the tables only have one partition.

And all rowstore tables have at least one partition! That happens automagically when you create a table.

Read the whole thing.

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Data Professional Survey Results

Published 2017-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has a roundup of blog posts concerning the data professional survey for 2017:

We asked to see your papers, and 2,898 people from 66 countries answered.

Download the raw data in Excel, and you can slice and dice by country, years of experience, whether you manage staff or not, education, and more.

Community bloggers have already started to analyze the results:

There were several entrants and some good posts, so check it out.

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Finding Suspect Objects

Published 2017-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield shows how to find which specific objects are suspect without running a full CHECKDB:

You’d really like to know what tables are affected without having to wait. Luckily(?), this corruption was recorded in msdb.dbo.suspect_pages, and having just recently read Paul Randal’s post here, we know we can use DBCC PAGE to determine this information. And, after having read my prior blog post, you know that we can automate DBCC PAGE, so we can use our new friend “WITH TABLERESULTS” to find out what objects have been corrupted.

The suspect_pages table, documented here, has three particular columns of interest: database_id, file_id and page_id. These correspond nicely to the first three parameters needed for DBCC PAGE. To automate this, we need to know what information we need to return off of the page – and from Paul’s post, we know that this is the field “METADATA: ObjectId”. For this code example, let’s assume that this corruption is on page 11 of the master database (just change “master” to the name of your 2TB database).

Read on for a script, including a script which checks all such suspect pages, and the possibly-better solution as of SQL Server 2012.

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