A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andrew Pruski answers an attendee question:
A few weeks ago I was presenting at SQL Saturday Raleigh and was asked a question that I didn’t know the answer to.
The question was, “can you change the location of named volumes in docker?”
This is one of the things that I love about presenting, being asked questions that I don’t know the answer to. They give me something to go away and investigate (many thanks to Dave Walden (b|t) for his help!)
Read on for Andrew’s answer.
Comments closedDavid Smith announces Microsoft R Open 3.4.4:
An update to Microsoft R Open (MRO) is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux. This release upgrades the R language engine to version 3.4.4, which addresses some minor issues with timezone detection and some edge cases in some statistics functions. As a maintenance release, it’s backwards-compatible with scripts and packages from the prior release of MRO.
MRO 3.4.4 points to a fixed CRAN snapshot taken on April 1 2018, and you can see some highlights of new packages released since the prior version of MRO on the Spotlights page. As always, you can use the built-in checkpoint package to access packages from an earlier date (for reproducibility) or a later date (to access new and updated packages).
David also spills the beans on when we’ll see MRO 3.5.0.
Comments closedRandolph West hits us with a misnamed SQL Server data type:
It occurred to me that we haven’t covered the
TIMESTAMPdata type in this series about dates and times.
TIMESTAMPis the Windows Millennium Edition of data types. It has nothing to do with date and time. It’s a row version. Microsoft asks that we stop calling itTIMESTAMPand useROWVERSIONinstead.Much like
DECIMALis a synonym ofNUMERIC, so too isTIMESTAMPa synonym ofROWVERSION. Please call it aROWVERSIONand pretend thatTIMESTAMPdoesn’t exist. Microsoft is deeply sorry for the confusion.
As I say, dates and times are hard. But at least this is easy: if you don’t use it, you won’t have problems with it.
Comments closedA second option is to use statistics profiling. This was introduced in SQL Server 2014 and is easily set by using SET STATISTICS PROFILE ON orenable query profiling globally using DBCC TRACEON (7412, -1). This trace flag is only available in SQL Server 2016 SP1 and above. Selecting from the dynamic management view (DMV) Sys.dm_exec_query_profiles you can do real time query execution progress monitoring while the query is running. This option will return estimated and actual rows by operator.
Click through for the full set of methods.
Comments closedOne way that we can do this is by signing the procedure (you can also use this with functions and triggers) with a certificate or an asymmetric key.
In this post I’m only going to look into signing a stored procedure with a certificate but the same ideas can be applied for the other objects and with an asymmetric key.
So…
We’re going to create a certificate and sign our stored proc using that certificate. We’ll then create a user based on the certificate and grant the new certificate user the appropriate permissions to run the stored procedure.
Every SQL Server DBA should know how to do this, but in my experience, it’s a small percentage who do.
Comments closedJames Serra announces changes to Azure SQL Data Warehouse:
The changes in Azure SQL DW Compute Optimized Gen2 tier are:
5x query performance via a adaptive caching technology. which takes a blended approach of using remote storage in combination with a fast SSD cache layer (using NVMes) that places data next to compute based on user access patterns and frequency
Significant improvement in serving concurrent queries (32 to 128 queries/cluster)
Removes limits on columnar data volume to enable unlimited columnar data volume
5 times higher computing power compared to the current generation by leveraging the latest hardware innovations that Azure offers via additional Service Level Objectives (DW7500c, DW10000c, DW15000c and DW30000c)
Added Transparent Data Encryption with customer-managed keys
Those are some good improvements. #2 in particular makes it possible for Azure SQL DW to be useful in a much larger number of environments.
Comments closedBrent Ozar reviews a blast from the past:
I picked up half a dozen used books about SQL Server 6.5, then spent a delightful weekend reading them. Seriously delightful – lemme tell you just how into it I was. Erika and I eat all weekend meals out at restaurants, but she saw me so happily curled up in my chair reading that she insisted on going out and getting tacos for us just so I wouldn’t have to get up. I was having that good of a time READING BOOKS ABOUT SQL SERVER 6.5. (Also, Erika is amazing. Moving on.)
To bring you that same fun, I wanna share with you a few pages from Inside SQL Server 6.5 by Ron Soukup, one of the fathers of SQL Server
It’s a great read. My contribution to the Old But Good oeuvre is the Handbook of Relational Database Design by Candace Fleming and Barbar von Halle. For my money, it has what I still consider the best primer on database normalization out there. It also has a bunch of stuff that we should be glad we don’t do anymore, like figuring out specific file layouts for non-clustered indexes to minimize the number of disk rotations needed to retrieve a record of data.
Comments closed