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Day: May 20, 2022

Finding Indexing Metrics in Cosmos DB

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran looks at the numbers:

You might need Composite Indexes to make your queries more efficient, Cosmos DB does not create any Composite Indexes for you. You need to figure out which properties should have composite indexes then you need to change the indexing policy file to create them. 

    Indexing Metrics comes to your help when you need help with indexing policy. It tells you which indexes the current query uses and it gives you hints about what other indexes you should create to make the query work faster/cheaper. Like many other features of Cosmos DB, you need to write code by using SDK to see Indexing Metrics. The following example shows how to enable Indexing Metrics for your queries.

Click through for a code sample which shows how to collect index metrics.

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Web Accessibility and Shiny

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Owen has a two-parter. First up, why web accessibility standards are important:

An accessible website is more than putting content online. Making a website accessible means ensuring that it can be used by as many people as possible. Accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) help to standardise the way in which a website can interact with assistive technologies. Allowing developers to incorporate instructions into their web applications which can be interpreted by technologies such as screen readers helps to maintain a consistent user experience for all.

Second, how Shiny apps tend to stack up:

The great thing about {shiny} is that it allows data practitioners a relatively simple, quick approach to providing an intuitive user interface to their R code via a web application. So effective is {shiny} at this job that it can be done with little to no traditional web development knowledge on the part of the developer. {shiny} and associated packages provide collections of R functions that return HTML, CSS and JavaScript which is then shipped to a browser. The variety of packages giving trivial access to styled front end components and widgets is already large and constantly growing. What this means is that R programmers can achieve a huge amount in the way of building complex, visually attractive web applications without needing to care very much about the underlying generated content that is interpreted by the browser.

As a quick spoiler, not so well. Read on for the full report.

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Cost Savings with Azure Data Factory

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck maximizes the savings:

As you might’ve noticed, pricing in ADF is not the same as it was in SSIS for example. In SSIS, you pay your SQL Server license and you’re done (well, and you buy a server to run it on). It doesn’t matter what you do with SSIS, the cost is the same. If you run 1 package or 1000 packages, there’s no difference except in your electricity bill. However, in ADF you pay more if you use it more. You pay for each action you do, you pay for each activity you use and for how long things are running. There are a couple of guidelines you can follow to try to minimize costs:

Read on for those guidelines and some specific helpful items.

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Troubleshooting Firewall Issues with Azure SQL MI

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Emanuele Meazzo sees a problem pop up regularly:

Here is something that will save you lots of time and headaches when trying to connect to Azure SQL Managed Instances, especially from onprem servers or from other clouds; I had to repeat this multiple times to multiple actors, so I know it will happen to someone else too.

In most cases, “Connect Timeout” and/or “Cannot open server xxx requested by the login; Login failed” errors are caused by the firewall configuration and a lack of understanding the SQLMI networking model, let me explain:

Read on for that explanation.

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Running Dynamic SQL in a Different Database

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher doesn’t like this database and wants to move to a new one:

This is one of those things that on hindsight was a stupid problem, but still cost me hours and a major headache. So I thought I would share the story of my headache with you. 

A few weeks ago I was working on some dynamic SQL that hit multiple databases. Not a huge issue. I do lots of dynamic SQL.

But it didn’t quite work out the way Kenneth initially envisioned. Read on for the full story.

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Searching SSRS Reports for Keywords

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Hannah Vernon does a search:

Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services, colloquially known as SSRS, provides a great way to expose data from SQL Server in human-consumable form, typically via a web site. Generally, it’s a good idea to use a stored procedure as the source of data for SSRS Reports. In a large SSRS environment, it can be challenging to determine which reports use a specific stored procedure.

This code provides details about SSRS Reports where the definition of the report includes any specific keyword, such as the name of a stored procedure.

Click through for a query against ReportServer.

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MySQL Security

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis starts a series on security in MySQL:

Security is a critical part of any infrastructure – it’s even more so in the database world, where one step in the wrong direction can be the cause of system disruptions and downtime, customer dissatisfaction, and in the worst-case scenario – deaths.

As MySQL is one of the primary relational database management systems being used in the world today, it’s critical to understand how to go about properly the database infrastructure to keep data breaches away from the organization’s websites or, if they’ve happened already, to become a thing of the past.

The first article covers some of the basics of security in MySQL. The second promises to have more.

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An Index for Change Tracking Cleanup

Published 2022-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

James Ferebee creates an index:

If the issue persists and we stack a lot of data that needs to be removed which can be too much for autocleanup to manage. At that point, we recommend running (as is indicated in the error message) sp_flush_CT_internal_table_on_demand which is discusseed in detailed in Amit’s blog post Change Tracking Cleanup–Part 1.

I will not discuss the internals of the process as Amit Banerjee already touched on this in the referenced blog. However if you are routinely encountering issues where autocleanup can’t keep up and/or manual cleanup is taking significant time, you can add the index and see if it helps and I have the process enumerated below. Keep in mind this is not guaranteed to fix all cleanup issues and it may still be necessary to run manual cleanup regularly. If you continue to have issues with cleanup feel free to create a ticket with us here at CSS to assist you and get specific data to your environment.

Read on for the index definition as well as some important notes about whether you might need it.

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