Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: May 2019

Modifying XML in T-SQL

Published 2019-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Max Vernon takes us through the .modify function:

Determining the property syntax when modifying XML values in SQL Server can be time consuming if you don’t work with XML regularly. SQL Server includes a very flexible XML subsystem, called XML_DML, or XML Data Manipulation Language. XML_DML can be used to easily and effectively update XML values in an xml-typed column or variable. This question on dba.stackexchange.comasked about using the .modify function to change the value of an element, which in turn prompted this post.

Read on for a number of examples.

Comments closed

Azure SQL Database Serverless

Published 2019-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through Azure SQL Database Serverless:

This is best used for those single databases that are ever changing with unpredictable patterns. With the concept of being billed per second (based on the vcores used) rather than per hour means that pricing can become more granular especially now with auto-pause becoming possible. The auto-pause delay defines the period of time the database must be inactive before it is automatically paused (only charged for storage). You should only use this if  you can afford some delay in compute warm-up after idle usage periods, otherwise it is best to stick with provisioned compute tiers ( classic tiers). 

I could see this being useful for dev or test databases, or maybe a personal site with heavy external caching.

Comments closed

dbatools 1.0 Forthcoming

Published 2019-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire announces that dbatools will be out on June 19th by my count:

We’ve got about 30 issues left to resolve which you can see and follow on our GitHub Projects page. If you’ve ever been interested in helping, now is the perfect time as we only have 30 more days left to reach our goal.

If you’re a current or past dbatools developer, we’d love any help we can get. Just hit up the GitHub Projects page to see what issues are left to resolve. If someone is already assigned, please reach out to them on Slack in the #dbatools-dev channel and see if they can use your help.

Read the whole thing and see if there’s anything you can do to help.

Comments closed

Apache Avro 1.9.0 Released

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Fokko Driesprong announces the release of Apache Avro 1.9.0:

Avro is a remote procedure call and data serialization framework developed within Apache’s Hadoop project. It uses JSON for defining data types and protocols, and serializes data in a compact binary format. If you’re unfamiliar with Avro, I would highly recommend the explanation of Dennis Vriend at Binx.io about an introduction into Avro.

Over 272 Jira tickets have been resolved, and 844 PRs are included since 1.8.2. I’d like to point out several major changes.

That’s a lot of tickets.

Comments closed

Loading Data Into SnowflakeDB

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Bilsborough shows a couple ways of loading data into SnowflakeDB from Azure:

Before being loaded into a Snowflake table, the data can be optionally staged, which is essentially just a pointer to a location where the files are stored. There are different types of stages including:
– User stages, which each user will have by default
– Table stages, which each table will have by default
– Internal named stages, meaning staged within Snowflake

Internal named stages are the best option for regular data loads, if you are thinking along the lines of your standard daily ETL process. One benefit of these is the flexibility in that they are database objects, so you can grant privileges to roles to access these objects as you would expect. Alternatively, there are external stages, such as Azure Blob storage.

Read on to see what comes next.

Comments closed

Proposed Max Server Memory Defaults

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West has a proposal for default max server memory on a SQL Server instance:

As noted in the previous post in this series, memory in SQL Server is generally divided between query plans in the plan cache, and data in the buffer pool (other uses for memory in SQL Server are listed later in this post).

The official documentation tells us:
[T]he default setting for max server memory is 2,147,483,647 megabytes (MB).

Look carefully at that number. It’s 2 billion megabytes. In other words, we might think of it as either 2 million gigabytes, 2,048 terabytes, or 2 petabytes.

Randolph is writing this like we don’t all have multiple petabytes of RAM on each machine.

Comments closed

Bash Script Introductions

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman continues a series on Bash scripting:

For Part II, we’ll start with the BASH script “introduction”.

The introduction in a BASH script should begin the same in all scripts.
1. Set the shell to be used for the script
2. Set the response to failure on any steps, (exit or ignore)
3. Add in a step for testing, but comment out or remove when in production

For our scripts, we’ll keep to the BASH format that is used by the template scripts, ensuring a repeatable and easy to identify introduction.

Click through to see what that entails.

Comments closed

Multi-Line Powershell Comments

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret shows how you can build out Powershell comments with multiple lines of code in them:

You can see above the first example looks good, however in the second example the first two lines should both have a prompt to show they are code. I spent a little while Googling this without much avail. I then figured, somewhere within dbatools there must be an example with two lines of code. Sure enough I found my answer, and it’s pretty straightforward.

Click through for the answer, as well as one of the most important Powershell cmdlets you’ll ever find on the Internet.

Comments closed

Making Corporate Color Palettes Palatable

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria takes us through a corporate coloring problem:

Last week, I had a conversation on twitter about dealing with corporate color palettes that don’t work well for data visualization. Usually, this happens because corporate palettes are designed with websites and/or marketing collateral in mind rather than information graphic design. This often results in colors being too bright, dark, or dull to be used together in a report. Sometimes the colors aren’t easily distinguishable from each other. Other times, the colors needed for various situations (main color, ancillary colors, highlight color, error color, KPIs, text, borders) aren’t available in the corporate palette.

You can still stay on brand and create a consistent user experience with a color palette optimized for data visualization. But you may not be using the exact hex values as defined in the corporate palette. I like to say the data viz color palette is “inspired by” the marketing color palette.

Click through for lots of goodies, including a link to a really interesting color tester.

Comments closed

Minimal Logging into Empty Clustered Indexes

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Paul White explains how to perform minimal logging when using the INSERT..SELECT pattern to insert into an empty table with a clustered index:

The summary top row suggests that all inserts to an empty clustered index will be minimally logged as long as TABLOCK and ORDER hints are specified. The TABLOCK hint is required to enable the RowSetBulk facility as used for heap table bulk loads. An ORDER hint is required to ensure rows arrive at the Clustered Index Insert plan operator in target index key order. Without this guarantee, SQL Server might add index rows that are not sorted correctly, which would not be good.

Unlike other bulk loading methods, it is not possible to specify the required ORDER hint on an INSERT...SELECT statement. This hint is not the same as using an ORDER BY clause on the INSERT...SELECT statement. An ORDER BY clause on an INSERTonly guarantees the way any identity values are assigned, not row insert order.

Read on to see what you can do.

Comments closed