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Month: November 2019

The Future of In-Memory OLTP?

Published 2019-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer has some speculation regarding In-Memory OLTP:

In SQL Server 2019 without that much deserved fanfare (for me at least), Microsoft has released a couple of improvements that made me think about the current status (was apparently almost dead) and the future of the In-Memory OLTP technology, that was launched in the year 2014, and besides significant improvements in SQL Server 2016 looked pretty much abandoned since. 

This is a perfect example of an excellent idea halfway implemented. There’s a lot of potential here, but enough pieces are missing that it’s hard to recommend using it outside of specialized scenarios. And that’s a shame given the potential.

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Creating a SQL Managed Instance

Published 2019-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret takes us through creation of a SQL Managed Instance:

I’ve been thinking about the cloud a lot lately, and I feel it’s an area that I would benefit from learning more about. I’ve attended a couple of presentations on SQL Managed Instances and have read enough to be dangerous (or accidentally spend a lot of money, one of my biggest fears when working in the cloud). However, I always find I learn best and really get to understanding a topic by building something.

This post will be the first in at least a two part series on SQL Managed Instances (MI). My goal in this post is just to deploy an MI and have it ready to use for my next post.

Read on for the step-by-step instructions.

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SQL Server 2019 Now Available

Published 2019-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Asad Khan announces the general availability of SQL Server 2019:

As you saw from our launch announcement earlier today, over a year ago at Microsoft Ignite we announced our first preview of SQL Server 2019 and today our latest release is now generally available.

You have told us that in today’s demanding world of massive data, wide variety of data sources, and expectations of near real-time application and query performance you need more than just a database engine. You need a modern data platform.

If you’re an early adopter, note that there is a patch for it already.

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Merging Datasets in R with the Tidyverse

Published 2019-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Anisa Dhana shows off several tidyverse methods for combining data sets together:

semi_join
The semi_join function is different than the previous examples of joins. A semi join creates a new dataset in which there are all rows from the data1 where there is a corresponding matching value in data2. Still, instead of the final dataset merging both the first (data1) and second (data2) datasets, it only contains the variables from the first one (data1).

Most of this looks like standard SQL joins, but read through to the end for a bonus which doesn’t typically appear in relational database products.

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Scripting and Deploying Data with SSDT

Published 2019-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Kamil Nowinski shows how you can script out and deploy data as part of your SSDT database project:

It’s a very common scenario when we have a database (project) and require some data in selected tables even in the freshly deployed, empty database.
Nomenclature for these data/tables that you can meet are:
– reference data
– master data
– dictionary
Which term have you heard and is closest to you?

By default, SSDT does not support scripting or deploying the data.
Hence: the question is: how we can cope with that?

Read on for the answer.

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Visual Studio 2019 and SQL Server Extensions

Published 2019-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun shows how you can install support for SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS with Visual Studio 2019:

Visual Studio 2019 brings new installation of SQL Server Integration services and SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services.

There is no need to download SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio) as used to do with Visual Studio 2017 or previous versions.

Installation is pretty easy once you know where to look.

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Azure AD Logins for Managed Instances

Published 2019-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Mirek Sztajno announces a new feature for Azure SQL Managed Instances:

We are happy to announce a general availability (GA) for Azure AD server principals (Azure AD logins) for SQL managed instance (MI). This feature allows Azure AD users to create logins in the master database for MI, grant MI server level permissions for these logins and create Azure AD users with     logins for individual MI databases.

Additionally, enabling Azure AD logins allow users to execute many MI features supported for SQL logins (see the documentation at the end of this blog).

Read on to learn more about this feature.

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RSExecRole Already Exists

Published 2019-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason troubleshoots an annoying error:

When migrating an instance of SSRS, I performed a backup of the [ReportServer] and [ReportServerTemp] SSRS databases from a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance and restored them to a SQL Server 2017 instance. After installing SSRS 2017 on the target machine, I ran SSRS configuration and attempted to set the Current Report Server Database to the existing [ReportServer] database I had already restored:

Read on to see the error and Dave’s fix. As I get older and more cantankerous, I realize even further the benefit of rerunnable scripts and repeatable processes. They prevent so many errors of this sort.

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Visualizing a Table

Published 2019-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic takes a fairly simple table and creates eight visuals out of it:

STEP 1: When I encounter this table, I start reading and scanning down columns and across rows. In terms of specific observations, I might start by noticing that the majority of accounts are in Tiers B and C, while Tiers A and A+—though they don’t make up a huge number (or percentage) of accounts—do make up a meaningful amount of revenue. In terms of questions, I wonder if the tiers are in order: I would think A+ belongs above A and am confused that they don’t appear that way in the table (perhaps due to alphabetical sorting?).

This is a really nice practical exercise if you want to learn how to apply the right visuals to tell your story.

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