A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Sandeep Arora creates an Availability Group in Google Kubernetes Engine:
This tutorial shows you how to configure SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups (AG) using DH2i DxEnterprise and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This offering helps you achieve high availability for your SQL Server databases running on containers in Kubernetes.
Click through for a rather detailed demo.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand splits and cares about sort order:
Last year, I wrote about replacing all your CLR or custom string splitting functions with native calls to
STRING_SPLIT. As I work on a project migrating several Microsoft SQL Server instances to Linux, I am encountering one of the roadblocks I mentioned last time: the need to provide an element in the output to indicate the order of the elements in the input string. This meansSTRING_SPLITin its current form is out, because 1) it offers no such column; and, 2) the results are not guaranteed to be returned in any specific order. Are there other ways to achieve this functionality at scale and without CLR?
As Koen mentions in the comments, you can now get STRING_SPLIT with a sort parameter, but Aaron’s response is also valid: not everybody will have access to that today, so it still makes sense to understand the options.
Comments closedKevin Wilkie deals with not-so-datey dates:
Because of the “not-so-dateness” of the data, you cannot convert non-date items into a date, at least not with the CONVERT function.
“Not-so-datey” is, of course, a technical term. Read on to see what you can use as an alternative to CONVERT().
Gilbert Quevauvilliers troubleshoots an error:
What I did learn when working through the blog post is that I ran into some errors when trying to re-connect or trying to connect to the Azure Storage in my Premium App Workspace and it failed.
The errors that I got were, “We couldn’t connect to Azure, but it’s likely temporary. Try again later or see details.”
Read on for the cause and the solution.
Comments closedAndrea Allred is waiting for an e-mail:
I don’t want emails that tell me everything is ok, only when things are bad and I want them to be helpful emails. Not only did I want an alert, I wanted an email with actual information that I can use to make my decisions. Decisions like, can I just apply a few logs to get caught up or did everything burn down and I need to pull a full backup plus all the logs to be up and running again?
This was a task for some super fancy alerts on my agent job.
Click through to see how.
Comments closedAria Jelinek and Nellie Gustafsson have some announcements for us:
Announced last week at Ignite 2021, data teams now have a handful of new opportunities to drive value with machine learning built directly into their Apache Spark pools in Azure Synapse Analytics.
With the general availability of our machine learning library for Apache Spark on Azure Synapse, data teams now have expanded access to both code-first and code-free ML tools for forecasting, model training, and pre-built AI. This library provides both familiar open-source tools such as LightGBM as well as proprietary solutions to provide a comprehensive, streamlined approach to ML workloads. Updates include PREDICT, a new keyword that supports scoring AzureML and MLFlow models directly in Azure Synapse, and integration with Azure Cognitive Services, now generally available.
Click through for all of the announcements.
1 CommentRob Farley riffs on another T-SQL Tuesday topic:
But the checks that we do are more about things that the database can allow, but are business scenarios that should never happen.
Plenty of businesses seem to recognise these scenarios all too well, and can point them out when they come across them. You hear phrases like “Oh, we know that’s not right, it should be XYZ instead”. And they become reasons why they don’t really trust their data. It’s a data quality issue, and every time someone comes across a data quality issue, they trust the data a little less.
Click through for Rob’s thoughts.
Comments closedDenny Cherry walks us through gateway logging in Azure:
If you’ve ever set up an Azure Network Gateway for Site to Site or Person to Site VPNing you’ve probably wanted to be able to see logging from the gateway. In the Azure portal, you can see a Logs option, but all it does is tell you to set up log analytics and the link that it gives you is … less than helpful.
Denny, however, has helpful instructions, so check it out.
Comments closedSteve Stedman prods the demons of merge replication:
At Stedman Solutions, we do a lot of work with SQL Server replication, mostly transactional and merge replication.
The other day I needed a query to show all the merge replication publication on a SQL Server, not just a single database, but to see it for all databases on the SQL Server.
Here is the query that I came up with.
Merge replication can be really great if you know what you’re doing. But it can also turn into a train wreck easily, and it’s really tough to get a good understanding of why something’s going wrong or how long it will take to be fixed (if at all).
Comments closedRonen Ariely has mixed feelings on updates to the STRING_SPLIT function:
The main issue with this function, is that it returns a SET of rows with no specific order.
As you must know by now, a TABLE is a SET of rows (Rowstore table which is the more common in SQL Server) or columns (Columnstore table). The rows in the table are not stored in specific order (even if using clustered index, the rows can physically be stored in different locations on the disk, not necessarily maintained continuously one after the other. In addition, the server might read the rows in parallel and not necessarily in the order of the index. As a result, The order in which rows are returned in a result set are not guaranteed unless an ORDER BY clause is specified.
And this is the main issue with the STRING_SPLIT… until today
Read on to see how this update makes STRING_SPLIT() much better, and also how it could be even better still.