A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Grant Fritchey gives us a technique to filter extended events:
Did you know, you can use Actions to Filter Extended Events? Well, you can. Filtering is one of the greatest ways in which Extended Events differentiates itself from other mechanisms of gathering information about the behavior of SQL Server. You can put Actions to work in your filtering. Best of all, the Actions don’t have to be collected in order to put them to work filtering your Extend Events.
Read on to see how.
Comments closedReitse Eskens continues a series on learning Azure Data Factory:
In my previous blog I created the integration runtimes, and the linked services. However, we need to create new datasets. If you remember, and I don’t blame you if you don’t, the dataset I created contained a reference to a table. That’s nice, but this time we don’t want just one table, we want a number of tables.
Click thorugh to check it out.
Comments closedEvery now and then you come across a use-case where you need to do something with spatial data, and you need to do it in the cloud (Azure, of course)! Up until that very point you maybe didn’t know, or perhaps even care, much about the intricacies of spatial data assets, let alone how the heck you were going to store it, process it, and query it, without making a mess of your current data stack.
Well, if you’re that person, then I say welcome to this blog post!
Click through for a fairly lengthy list, including Rolf’s comments on each. Also note the one big omission from the list as far as data platform products.
Comments closedChad Callihan explains why you should be careful before deploying code which uses index hints:
This might be good enough…for now. The potential issues with index hints can be more about the future than the present. You might come along later on and think “why not use an index to cover the whole query?” We can add the index:
But if our query is still written to include the index hint (in a stored procedure for example) the new index is not going to matter. The old index is still forced to be used. Even if something better comes along, you’re going to need to modify the query in addition to adding the better index. If an index was added for a completely separate query but would also be an improvement for the query in question, it’s also not going to get by the index hint.
Click through for additional problems which can crop up as you use index hints. This isn’t a big argument against using them at all, but rather understanding (and remembering!) where you do use them and making sure that’s communicated well to the entire team, including future you.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino has a round-up for us:
I want to start by saying thank you to all who submitted, and an amazing collection of people submitted some fantastic content. Also, thanks to Steve for asking me to host and being patient with me for mixing up the dates and the hashtag. It’s #tsql2sday and it’s on Tuesday not Wednesday 😛
Click through for links to the entrants.
Comments closedHolger von Jouanne-Diedrich takes us through Euler’s equation:
In this post, we will first give some intuition for and then demonstrate what is often called the most beautiful formula in mathematics, Euler’s identity, in R – first numerically with base R and then also symbolically, so read on!
Do check it out, even if the term “Euler’s equation” means nothing to you.
Comments closedTomaz Kastrun has fun with colors:
How about some colours in line graph?
Or even more wacky? Nevertheless, let’s create a function that generates some sample “mocked” data and draws a line chart:
The outputs look a lot like waveforms of spoken language, so you’ve got that going for you.
Comments closedChris Shaw lays out some of the problems with monitoring systems today:
A next-generation monitoring tool should not just provide the same standard old dashboard dressed up with new fancy graphs; it should empower me to be actionable. It needs to help me improve the environment and show me the impacts of those actions on the system, and thus, the business.
What the industry needs (for risk of rendering the title of this article bunk) is not another monitoring tool. I have tools that help me monitor and they do a fine job of specifically doing that. I need a tool that will take me into the future, I need a tool that makes me better and faster at what I do. This industry needs a smarter tool.
Click through to see what Chris has in mind, though the reason you haven’t seen some of this stuff is that it’s a couple orders of magnitude more difficult than what we do see in monitoring solutions. H/T Amanda White.
Comments closedDebbi Lyons and Vijay Kumar have a reminder for us:
While new innovations keep lighting up in the latest releases of SQL Server and Windows Server, support for older versions along with security updates will eventually end. This can lead to the potential for compliance gaps for workloads that still rely on these versions and create missed opportunities to apply innovation to business-critical workloads. SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012, and 2012 R2 End of Extended support is approaching:
– SQL Server 2012 Extended Support will end on July 12, 2022.
– Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Extended Support will end on October 10, 2023.
The news this week has mostly been about SQL Server 2016 ending mainstream support, but this is a bigger one. Fortunately, there’s still a year to procrastinate plan.
Kenneth Fisher pads some work:
I’ve been working on converting a piece of DB2 code into T-SQL and one of the functions I had to replace was lpad. It’s a simple enough function that will pad a string on the left with another string. So changing 1234 to 00001234. It’s a common enough task when formatting strings. And both DB2 and Oracle provide both lpad and rpad functions. However, guess what? SQL Server doesn’t. So how do we handle that in T-SQL? It’s a pretty easy pattern.
Click through for the answer.
Comments closed