A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
SQL introduced the new STRING_AGG feature in SQL 2017, and it works just like it suggests it would: it’s an aggregate function that takes all of the string values and joins them together with a separator. To see how it works, I’m using the StackOverflow users table, and let’s say we want to create a list of Display Names and we’re going to group it based on Location:
Click through for two methods, one of which is considerably better than the other.
Comments closedThomas Williams has a job for SQL Server:
As part of commissioning a SQL Server, I create a server trigger to send an e-mail when a new database is created (adapted from https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2864/email-alerts-when-new-databases-are-created-in-sql-server/), and a SQL Agent alert which e-mails when a database is restored (inspired by Jeremy Dearduff’s comment at https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/06/tracking-restores-hard/#comment-2446362).
After receiving the e-mail I can follow up and include the database in an inventory. See below for the trigger and alert scripts – feel free to use these as a basis for your own monitoring and inventory.
Click through for the script, as well as an important disclaimer.
Comments closedPaul Thurrott looks at a security issue:
Over 1000 web apps created with Microsoft’s Power Apps inadvertently exposed the data from over 38 million users thanks to a misconfiguration, according to a new report in Wired. The good news? The issue has been fixed and no customers are known to have been compromised.
“We found [a web app created with Power Apps] that was misconfigured to expose data and we thought, we’ve never heard of this, is this a one-off thing or is this a systemic issue?” UpGuard vice president Greg Pollock told Wired. “Because of the way the Power Apps portals product works, it’s very easy to quickly do a survey. And we discovered there are tons of these exposed. It was wild.”
“Known to have been compromised” probably needs a “yet” in there somewhere. Read the whole thing.
Comments closedChris Webb has a performance tip for us:
You may have noticed that a new dataflows connector was announced in the August 2021 release of Power BI Desktop, and that it now supports query folding between a dataset and a dataflow – which you may be surprised to learn was not possible before. In this post I thought I’d take a look at how much of an improvement in performance this can make to dataset refresh performance.
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedImke Feldmann has an update to the Power BI Cleaner:
In this post I’m sharing a new version of my Power BI Cleaner tool. Besides from some bug fixes it can now automatically identify and analyze reports that are connected to an Analysis Services Model in tabular mode.
Just a warning that the live connections to Analysis Service or shared Power BI dataset might be slow, as Power Query will retrieve the data from all datasets that are available for your from the service. I might include a feature to pre-select datasets in a future release if there is interest. So please add comments if you want to see this feature.
Read on to see how to set everything up, as well as the things you can do with it.
Comments closedJared Poche continues a series on QDS Toolbox:
Carrying on from my previous post on the QDS Toolbox, let’s review the Query Waits component.
This component provides details about the wait types associated with a given object, query, or plan. This doesn’t pull data from the reports generated by the Server Top Queries component; this gets the data directly from the Query Store in the database you specify. So you can use this to review the waits on a given procedure, even if you haven’t generated any reports with Server Top Queries .
That being said, reports from Server Top Queries could identify problem queries and give you the PlanID, QueryID, or ObjectName you need to run the procedure. A query that spends a lot of time waiting would tend to have a higher duration and lower active metrics like CPU usage or logical reads. So those are the queries I would want to run the Query Waits report against.
Read on to see how to call this procedure and what you might expect.
Comments closed