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Month: April 2017

Troubleshooting AG Creation Failure

Published 2017-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino digs into logs to troubleshoot a failure when trying to create an Availability Group:

Now we have some data to look through!

When we look at the contents of the cluster logs, we’re totally on the other side of the spectrum when it comes to information verbosity. The logs so far have been pretty terse and haven’t really told us about what’s causing the failure…well dig through this log and you’ll likely find your reason and a lot more information. Good stuff to look at to get an understanding of the internals of WSFCs. Now for the the reason my Availability Group creation failed was permissions. Check out the log entries.

It’s a good troubleshooting guide.

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Building A Recommendation System With Graph Data

Published 2017-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Arvind Shyamsundar and Shreya Verma show how to implement a recommender system using SQL Server 2017’s new graph database functionality:

As you can see from the animation, the algorithm is quite simple:

  • First, we identify the user and ‘current’ song to start with (red line)
  • Next, we identify the other users who have also listened to this song (green line)
  • Then we find the other songs which those other users have also listened to (blue, dotted line)
  • Finally, we direct the current user to the top songs from those other songs, prioritized by the number of times they were listened to (this is represented by the thick violet line.)

The algorithm above is quite simple, but as you will see it is quite effective in meeting our requirement. Now, let’s see how to actually implement this in SQL Server 2017.

Click through for animated images as well as an actual execution plan and recommendations for graph query optimization (spoilers:  columnstore all the things).  They also link to the GitHub project where you can try it out yourself.

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Finding Query Plan Regressions

Published 2017-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic shows how to find query plan regressions in SQL Server 2017:

In CTP2.0 version is added new system view sys.dm_db_tuning_recommendations that returns recommendations that you can apply to fix potential problems in your database. This view contains all identified potential performance issues in SQL queries that are caused by the SQL plan changes, and the correction scripts that you can apply. Every row in this view contains one recommendation that you can apply to fix the issue. Some of the information that are shown in this view are:

  • Id of the query, plan that caused regression, and the plan that that might be used instead of this plan.

  • Reason that describes what kind of regression is detected (e.g. CPU time for the query is changed from 17ms to 189ms)

  • T-SQL script that can be used to force the plan.

  • Information about the current plan, and previous plan that had better performance.

In the “surgical scalpel to chainsaw” range of query tuning options, this rates approximately guillotine.  I think it’ll be a very useful tool for finding issues, but it wouldn’t be wise to start lopping off all the heads just because the optimizer tells you to.  In this context, I imagine this DMV to be about as useful as the missing indexes DMV and for the same reasons.

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Team Maturity Levels

Published 2017-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott has the best lists:

Maturity Levels

OK so this is pretty simple, we have these levels:

  • Low
  • Medium
  • High

Wow. Just WOW

That is an amazing list, how did you come up with it? Did it come from some phd study on the effectiveness of lists in the internet age? No.

So a little more detail…

Read on for Ed’s take on database development maturity levels.  I might quibble with some of the specifics, but I agree with the principle.

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Back Up Those System Databases

Published 2017-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal had gremlins infest his server, causing a service pack installation to go sideways:

I try to start the service but it fails. (I was desperate ok!)

Script level upgrade for database ‘master’ failed because upgrade step ‘msdb110_upgrade.sql’ encountered error 5846, state 1, severity 16. This is a serious error condition which might interfere with regular operation and the database will be taken offline. If the error happened during upgrade of the ‘master’ database, it will prevent the entire SQL Server instance from starting. Examine the previous errorlog entries for errors, take the appropriate corrective actions and re-start the database so that the script upgrade steps run to completion.

Cannot recover the master database. SQL Server is unable to run. Restore master from a full backup, repair it, or rebuild it. For more information about how to rebuild the master database, see SQL Server Books Online.

To be honest, rebuilding master would be my last option.

Read the whole thing, and then double-check that you have good copies of master & msdb somewhere.

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Instantiating Cortana Intelligence Gallery Solutions

Published 2017-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates has a step-by-step guide showing how to install a solution from the Cortana Intelligence Gallery:

We had no options along the way for selecting names for resources, so we have a lot of auto-generated suffixes for our resource names. This is ok for purely learning scenarios, but not my preference if we’re starting a true project with a pre-configured solution. Following an existing naming convention is impossible with solutions (at this point anyway). A wish list item I have is for the solution deployment UI to display the proposed names for each resource and let us alter if desired before the provisioning begins.

The deployment also doesn’t prompt for which subscription to deploy to (if you have multiple subscriptions like I do). The deployment did go to the subscription I wanted, however, it would be really nice to have that as a selection to make sure it’s not just luck.

It sounds like there are some undesirable defaults, but at least it does appear to be very easy to do.

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R 3.4.0 Now Available

Published 2017-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

A new version of R is now available:

  • Accumulating vectors in a loop is faster – Assigning to an element of a vector beyond the current length now over-allocates by a small fraction. The new vector is marked internally as growable, and the true length of the new vector is stored in the truelength field. This makes building up a vector result by assigning to the next element beyond the current length more efficient, though pre-allocating is still preferred. The implementation is subject to change and not intended to be used in packages at this time.

There’s a big list of changes, so check it out and think about upgrading.

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Building An Online R Training Environment

Published 2017-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Steph Locke has shared how she put together a training lab for her R workshop:

This starts with the tidyverse & Rstudio then:

  • adds the requisite programs for dependencies in my package and whois for mkpasswd to be able to work

  • installs packages from github, notably the one designed to facilitate the day of text analysis

  • get the shell script and the csv from the gist

  • make the shell script executable and then run it

I loved the business card touch.  It’s easy enough to print out little strips of paper with the username and password, but this has a bit more staying power.

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Getting Off Of Profiler, A Twelve-Step Program

Published 2017-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield has a blast from the past, repeating an old T-SQL Tuesday to show how to use Extended Events:

Now that you have this XE session scripted out, it can be easily installed on multiple servers. If you encounter a deadlock problem, you can easily start the XE session and let it run to trap your deadlocks. They will be persisted to a file dedicated for the deadlocks. You can use my Deadlock Shredder script at http://bit.ly/ShredDL to read the deadlocks from the file and shred the deadlock XML into a tabular output.

Note that the default system_health XE session also captures deadlocks. I like to have a dedicated session for just deadlocks. As lightweight as XE is, sometimes it may benefit a server to turn off the system_health session. Additionally, Jonathan Kehayias has a script that will take a running trace and completely script out an XE session for it. This script can be found at https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/jonathan/converting-sql-trace-to-extended-events-in-sql-server-2012/. Even though this script is available, I like to figure things out for myself so that I can learn what is actually going on.

Extended Events are extremely useful for administrators, typically with a fraction of the overhead cost of  server-side (much less Profiler) traces.

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Secret Mysteries Of SQL Server 2017

Published 2017-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling goes spelunking for new and modified internal objects in SQL Server 2017:

sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats

sys.dm_db_missing_index_group_stats
What have we here?

 

Of particular interest are last_sql_handle, query_hash, and query_plan_hash. It appears that we’ll finally be able to easily tie missing index requests to their queries, without doing a lot of painful XML processing. I had planned on adding something like this, but couldn’t find a good fit between 1) adding XML processing to sp_BlitzIndex, or adding more DMV queries and rather unpleasant XML processing to sp_BlitzCache. This will make implementing it far easier, assuming it works the way it looks like it will work.

Erik has three examples of interesting additions in CTP 2.0.

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