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Day: September 24, 2019

SQL Server Management Studio 18.3

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dinakar Nethi announces a new version of SQL Server Management Studio:

Fixed the hard to see dialog for Query Options when the user right-clicks on the T-SQL editor window by making it resizable.

The Completion time message that’s visible in the result grid/file  that was introduced in SQL Server Management Studio 18.2 is now configurable under Tools > Options > Query Execution > SQL Server > Advanced > Show completion time.

In the connection dialog, we replaced Active Directory – Password and Active Directory – Integrated with Azure Active Directory – Password and Azure Active Directory – Integrated, respectively.

There are a pretty good number of bugfixes in this release.

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Record Transformation with cdata

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

John Mount shows off one of the advantages of using cdata to define data-driven record transformation specifications:

We have a tutorial on how to design such transforms by writing down the shape your incoming data records are arranged in, and also the shape you wish your outgoing data records to be arranged in.

This simple data transform is in fact not a single pivot/un-pivot, as the result records spread data-values over multiple rows and multiple columns at the same time. We call the transform simple, because from a user point of view: it takes records of one form to another form (with the details left to the implementation).

Read the whole thing.

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Ring Buffer CPU Over 100%

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton ran into an oddity with sys.dm_os_ring_buffers:

Wait! Process Utilization + Idle adds up to waaaaay over 100…What’s going on?

My first thought was that the CPU was being throttled, so I checked the windows power options – for some really irritating reason, Windows defaults to a “balanced” power setting, which is rubbish for SQL Server.

That looks OK, but… if you check the CPU page of the Task Manager, things are a bit more interesting:

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t have a conclusion, but Thomas’s conjecture does make sense.

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Documenting Maintenance Plans

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason wants to document each SQL Agent job, including maintenance plans:

I’m not a regular user of Maintenance Plans for SQL Server, but I run into them from time to time. I had a task to document all of the SQL Agent jobs, which for a number of environments, included some Maintenance Plans. This became a more time consuming task than I had anticipated!

I had known beforehand that Maintenance Plans were SSIS packages under the covers. So I started with a query on msdb.dbo.sysssispackages. I also knew that SSIS packages are essentially XML data. 

Take advantage of the bulk of time Dave had to sink into this.

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Query Store Q&A

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato had a lot of questions about Query Store, and the answers turned into a blog post:

5. If you have 3+ plans how does SQL Server decide which plan to use?
A: I assume this is specific to the Automatic Plan Correction feature, and if so, it will force the last good plan (most recent plan that performed better than the current plan).  More details in my Automatic Plan Correction in SQL Server post.
 
6. What equivalent options we have for lower versions?
A:  There is an open-source tool called Open Query Store for versions prior to SQL Server 2016.

Click through for all 19 of the questions.

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Shortest Path in Graphs

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Mala Mahadevan looks at the shortest path function in SQL Server Graph:

‘Shortest path’ is the term accorded to the shortest distance between any two points, referred to as nodes in graph databases. The algorithm that helps you find the shortest distance between node A and node B is called the Shortest Path Algorithm.

Let us go back to the movie database. We have two people, say Amrish Puri and Harrison Ford. Amrish wants to meet Harrison Ford. He has not acted with Ford, he may have a few connections in common – or people who know him. Or people who know him who know him. This is one way to get an introduction. Or, let us say you are interviewing for a job. You want to see if someone in your network works at that place – so that you can get an idea of what the job or the company is like. So you go on linkedin – do a search for the company, look under ‘people’, and it tells you if anyone in your network is there, or someone is 2 levels away, or 3. Those numbers are what we get from the shortest path feature.

Read on for a few examples of shortest path in action.

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Divide, RankX, and N/A

Published 2019-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Collie has some fun with DIVIDE():

A blank cell in a report is sometimes a source of confusion for those human beings consuming our work. “What does a blank cell mean,” they ask.  “It’s a division by zero,” we reply.  “Wut,” they then ask.  “Trust me,” we say, “you don’t want to see the alternative.”  “But I don’t trust you, and now I don’t trust this whole report,” is what they sometimes say next – whether under their breath or out loud.

But “N/A” is a lovely value to display.  It raises far fewer eyebrows.  “Oh, it says our Profit Margin % for electric blankets sold in Cancun is “N/A” – I get it, we’ve never sold that product there.”  No convo required.

Click through for the full story.

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