A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Shivani Sarthi clues us in on Grafana alerts:
Grafana alerts are useful since they tell you about the problems in your system moments after they occur. Which in turn results in quickly resolving the issue. Also reducing the disruption time of the service.
Click through for an overview of functionality, where you can post alerts, and how to configure them.
Comments closedAlex Woodie discusses a new storage solution:
In the hunt for the optimal long-term storage, media comes and media goes. From cave paintings and daguerreotypes to tape and optical disk, humans continue to search for new ways to preserve information for use by subsequent generations. Now an Upstate New York company is touting a new type of archive that leverages an element with the ultimate in longevity: gold.
Totenpass today announced the launch of its novel storage solution that’s made of gold. Data is written directly to the surface of the gold cartridge (which features some nickel) using a laser etching process. The data takes the form of shrunken down human-readable images or documents, or machine-readable data that can be encrypted and read with a smartphone app (which is still in development).
This makes perfect sense to me. If you write it in metal, that means Ruin can’t read or modify it.
Comments closedManvendra Singh does the math:
Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) encrypts database files to secure your data. It also encrypts the tempdb database to secure your data in a temporary space. The process of encryption and decryption adds additional overhead to the database system. Even non-encrypted databases hosted on the same SQL Server instance would have some performance degradation because of tempdb encryption. Today I will show you performance impact analysis using few simple T-SQL statements by comparing their stats gathered before and after enabling TDE.
I will execute T-SQL statements (INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT, BACKUP DATABASE) before and after enabling encryption (Transparent Data Encryption) and gather their performance statistics during each execution. Finally, once we will have performance stats taken before and after enabling encryption then we will compare them to understand the performance impact analysis. I have used DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS before executing each query to clean the buffer cache.
Click through for the results. My rule of thumb is about a 5% performance overhead, but Manvendra shows us some of the particulars of what that means.
Comments closedJess Pomfret has a Powershell snippet for us:
This morning I was working on pulling together some information which included whether certain accounts were in the local administrator’s group on some remote servers. I had the perfect snippet saved in my code repo so I was quickly able to answer that question – and then I realised I should share that with you all.
Click through for the script.
Comments closedHow to organize workspaces in Power BI is one of those topics that comes up a lot. On one hand, it’s really easy to quickly create a workspace and keep moving. At the same time, it’s also really useful to have a strategy for how you scope your workspaces so they don’t get out of hand over time.
In this post & video we’re going to cover 4 sets of criteria to consider when planning for workspaces in the Power BI Service.
Click through for the video, as well as a post with the details.
Comments closedRobert Cain takes us through Markdown and snippets in Visual Studio Code:
Seriously though, I do find this documentation language very useful, and easy to use. With just a few commands I can produce a nicely formatted document that can be displayed in my code editor, as well as on platforms like GitHub. I’ve even begun authoring these blog posts in Markdown.
A big reason for me is the ability to integrate it into my projects. VSCode, as well as the full blow Visual Studio, support Markdown (with of course the proper extensions installed). When I create a new PowerShell project in VSCode, I can store the projects documentation in Markdown format right alongside the PowerShell code.
By the way, two VS Code extensions I can highly recommend for their Markdown support are Markdown All in One and markdownlint.
Comments closedThomas Williams has built a documentation engine:
Sometimes there’s a need to create database documentation – an old fashioned list of tables, columns, views etc. – as part of delivering a project, or for analysts, project managers and end users.
In these situations I tend to automate. SQL Server is very “meta” in that it contains tables and records that describe, well, other tables and records. Coupled with the
MS_Descriptionextended property, it’s a powerful way to keep up-to-date documentation in close proximity to the code itself.The script below will generate Markdown for database tables, views, stored procedures and functions. Column names and data types are listed for tables. View definitions are output. For stored procedures and functions, only the
MS_Descriptionextended property will be output.
Click through for a big disclaimer and a bigger script.
Comments closedItzik Ben-Gan explains Inline Table-Valued Functions:
Compared to the previously covered named table expressions, iTVFs resemble mostly views. Like views, iTVFs are created as a permanent object in the database, and therefore are reusable by users who have permissions to interact with them. The main advantage iTVFs have compared to views is the fact that they support input parameters. So, the easiest way to describe an iTVF is as a parameterized view, although technically you create it with a CREATE FUNCTION statement and not with a CREATE VIEW statement.
It’s important not to confuse iTVFs with multi-statement table-valued functions (MSTVFs). The former is an inlinable named table expression based on a single query similar to a view and is the focus of this article. The latter is a programmatic module that returns a table variable as its output, with multi-statement flow in its body whose purpose is to fill the returned table variable with data.
Now that we have that sorted, click through to see examples and dive into performance ramifications.
Comments closed