A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Neil Saunders takes a look at a classic chart:
I first heard Florence Nightingale and her Geeks Declare War on Death, an episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast, premiered as a special episode of 99% Invisible. It discusses Nightingale’s work as a statistician and in particular, her visualisation of mortality causes in the Crimean War using the famous “rose chart”, or polar area diagram.
I’m sure you’re thinking: how can I explore that using R?
Read on to find out.
Comments closedI remembered that I had another blog and actually wrote something technical:
Not too long ago, I worked through an interesting issue with Azure Machine Learning. The question was, what’s the best way to read from Azure SQL Database, perform model processing, and then write results out to Azure SQL Database? Oh, by the way, I want to use a service principal rather than SQL authentication. Here’s what I’ve got.
This turned out to be a lot more work than I first expected.
Comments closedJust when you thought you were done with cleaning MSDB, Eitan Blumin brings you back in for more:
As part of its regular, ongoing, day-to-day activities, your SQL Server instance would naturally collect historical data about its automated operations. If left unchecked, this historical data could pile up, leading to wasted storage space, performance hits, and even worse issues.
MSDB would obviously be collecting data about the SQL Agent job executions. But there are also a few other types of historical data that needs to be cleaned up once in a while.
Click through for part 2 in the series, which covers a half-dozen more things.
Comments closedGrant Fritchey has another use for Query Store:
There are a lot of uses for Query Store, but one of the most interesting is as an upgrade tool. We all know that upgrades in SQL Server can be more than a little bit nerve wracking. No matter how much you tested stuff in lower environments, deploying an update to production might result in performance issues as your code hits a regression. This is even more true when upgrading from versions of SQL Server prior to 2014 to anything 2014 and above. That’s because of the new cardinality estimation engine introduced in 2014. Most queries won’t notice it. Some queries will benefit from the better estimates. A few, problematic, queries will suffer. This is where Query Store can be used as an upgrade tool.
Read on to learn how.
Comments closedMatt Allington has a follow-up from a prior post:
I blogged about how to Build a P&L With Power BI back in April 2020, and the response from my readers was great. Several people asked how to add percentages such as % of net sales revenue, % gross profit, etc. into the P&L. I decided therefore to do a follow up article to show how you could add percentages to the P&L and also to further demonstrate how I go about solving such problems. Keep in mind, there is rarely one way to solve a problem in DAX; I’m simply sharing the way I solved this problem.
Click through for a video as well as a demo in screenshots.
Comments closedHasan Savran notes an improvement to the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient library:
You need to watch for Transient errors if you use SQL Server in Azure. Transient errors or Retriable errors can occur any time and your application should be smart enough to retry these failed operations. Azure might quickly shift hardware resources of your database to give you a better load-balance, when this happens your application might not be able to connect to the database. Since these reconfiguration events completes quickly, your application needs to be designed to handle these faults.This adds more complexity to your code because you need to write code to handle this manually.
Preview version of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient library now supports RetryLogic function, you do not need to write any manual code to handle Transient or retriable errors anymore.
Click through for more details as well as a demonstration. I’m surprised it took this long, to be honest—useful retry logic is exactly the type of thing which should be in the bowels of a library rather than littered throughout business code (or worse, not even in business code).
Comments closedErik Darling has a bone to pick with TOP PERCENT:
There was a three-part series of posts where I talked about a weird performance issue you can hit with parameterized top. While doing some query tuning for a client recently, I ran across a funny scenario where they were using TOP PERCENT to control the number of rows coming back from queries.
With a parameter.
So uh. Let’s talk about that.
Read on to see the mess of an execution plan TOP PERCENT creates and a more complex query which performs considerably better under the circumstances.