A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chad Callihan gets rid of secondary data files:
As I was working on a recent tempdb blog post, I encountered an error when trying to remove data files. Let’s look into the issue you may have removing data files and the solution to get those files cleaned up.
Click through to see how you can empty a data file and remove it without receiving error messages. I’m going to guess that this works better on lightly-used databases more than slammed ones.
Comments closedMatthew Roche wants a re-naming:
To successfully implement managed self-service business intelligence at any non-trivial scale, you need data governance. To build and nurture a successful data culture, data governance is an essential part of the success.
Despite this fact, and despite the obvious value that data governance can provide, data governance has a bad reputation. Many people – likely including the leaders you need to be your ally if you’re working to build a data culture in your organization – have had negative experiences with data governance in the past, and now react negatively when the topic of data governance is raised.
They now treat data governance as a four-letter word.
Read the whole thing, though I do disagree with Matthew. Changing the name does not change the underlying problems; all it does is make the new name just as hated as the old one because the problems are still there. Call it Data Enablement if you’d like, but if the process is the same and the tools are the same, the outcome is the same, regardless of the name.
Comments closedAjay Dwivedi sets up an alert:
Recently one of my LinkedIn friends contacted me for a blocking alert that would work on on-prem & cloud SQL Server instances alike. Previously I wrote https://ajaydwivedi.com/2018/08/how-to-setup-blocking-alerts-on-sql-server blog post for on-prem SQL Server blocking alert which makes use of WMI based event.
So I wrote the following blocking alert setup code for SQL Server that has the below features –
– Send mail notification to one or more recepients unlike SQL Agent job which is restricted to only one operator.
– Parameter to control the consistent blocking threshold. Nobody wants spontaneous blockings which comes/goes.
– Parameter to control the mail notification delay. Say, I want to be notified every X minutes (defult 15 minutes).
– Parameter to control the mail notification subject.
– Separate mail notification for Blocking & Script failure itself.
– Auto-clearing feature. Means, if the blocking is resolved, we should get an automated mail notification saying Blocking is cleared.
Click through for the instructions.
Comments closedMiltos Allamanis and Marc Brockschmidt take us through a new paper:
Finding and fixing bugs in code is a time-consuming, and often frustrating, part of everyday work for software developers. Can deep learning address this problem and help developers deliver better software, faster? In a new paper, Self-Supervised Bug Detection and Repair, presented at the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), we show a promising deep learning model, which we call BugLab. BugLab can be taught to detect and fix bugs, without using labelled data, through a “hide and seek” game.
I think there’s a lot more research required before we get to the point where this is useful in practical circumstances, but it’s exciting to see.
Comments closedKuldeepak Gupta shows off pattern matching in Scala:
Pattern Matching is a mechanism of checking a value against a Pattern. It gives a way of checking the given sequence of tokens for the presence of a specific pattern. Here, we match expressions against a pattern.
Compared to the ‘switch’ in C++, C, JAVA, there’s no fall through to the next alternative in Scala pattern matching. A Match error is thrown when no pattern matches.
This is a powerful part of functional programming.
Comments closedTomas Zika takes us through a conundrum:
If it’s the first time you’re seeing a problem like this, it can be confusing. How can
15be less than13?My first train of thought was the same as the original poster’s. Ok, so both values are converted to
varcharaccording to data type precedence – similar to this:
It’s not due to a varchar comparison, but Tomas does have an answer for us.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand preps us for SQL Server 2022:
In an earlier tip, “Find MAX value from multiple columns in a SQL Server table,” Sergey Gigoyan showed us how to simulate GREATEST() and LEAST() functions, which are available in multiple database platforms but were – at least at the time – missing from Transact-SQL. These functions are now available in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, and will be coming in SQL Server 2022, so I thought it was a good time to revisit Sergey’s methods and compare.
Read on to see how the workaround compares.
Comments closedTom Collins explains a database wait:
SQL Server Log truncation deletes inactive Virtual Log Files (VLF) from the SQL Server database transaction log . The Log truncation process frees space in the logical log for reuse by the Physical transaction log. If no truncation occurs , eventually it will fill all the disk space allocated to physical log files.
SQL Server Log truncation can be delayed for a range of different reasons.A good starting point is to query the sys.databases log_reuse_wait and log_reuse_wait_desc columns. This will supply different waits describing the reason for a delay
Read on for more info about the OLDEST_PAGE wait.
Etienne Lopes tracks a notification event:
Did you ever need to automate some actions immediately after a database restore?
There are several ways to accomplish this, in this article I will demonstrate one of them, using a simple event called: “AUDIT_BACKUP_RESTORE_EVENT“
Read on to learn more about how to use this event.
Comments closedJames Serra keeps us up to date on Synapse:
Delta Lake support for serverless SQL is generally available: Azure Synapse has had preview-level support for serverless SQL pools querying the Delta Lake format. This enables BI and reporting tools to access data in Delta Lake format through standard T-SQL. With this latest update, the support is now Generally Available and can be used in production. See How to query Delta Lake files using serverless SQL pools
Click through for the full list of what James likes.
Comments closed