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Month: April 2024

Checking SSIS Package Performance

Published 2024-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword digs into SSISDB:

I’ve recently been reviewing SSIS packages to make some performance fixes and needed a way to validate the results of those changes. I thought I’d share the scripts as they may be useful for others.

Rather than relying on run times from the SQL Agent running the packages I wanted to dive deeper into the packages so took another approach.

Read on for a query that gets the information. You can also eyeball it in the SSIS reports if you have a small or consistent set of packages to run.

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Comparing Cumulative Values for Events across Different Periods

Published 2024-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler performs comparative analytics:

In a previous article about format strings, we showed an example of how format strings can improve visualizations. The visualizations in that article compared the performance of a company’s marketing videos on a streaming platform to the average of all their videos released that year. In this article, we explain how to conduct this analysis yourself in DAX, where you compare series that occur in different periods.

Click through for an explanation, both in video and in blog form.

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Cannot Open Backup Device with SQL Managed Instance and SAS Token

Published 2024-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Sam Garth troubleshoots an issue:

On a recent case, a customer was trying to restore a database from a storage account using a SAS token when they received the below error.

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch.
(Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo)

Additional information:
Cannot open backup device
‘https://storage.blob.core.windows.net/container/dbbackup_2024_03_21_121901.bak‘
Operating system error 86(The specified network password is not correct.).
RESTORE HEADERONLY is terminating abnormally. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 3201)

Read on for the troubleshooting steps Sam followed to solve the problem.

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PostgreSQL Row Visibility Indicators

Published 2024-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Cary Huang explains how row visibility works in Postgres:

Simply put, the visibility refers to whether a row of data (Heap Tuple by default) should be displayed to the user in certain states, backend processes, or transactions.

For example,

  • A user changes a data record from ‘A’ to ‘B’ via UPDATE
  • PostgreSQL handles this by INSERTing a new record call ‘B’ while marking record ‘A’ as ‘invisible’
  • Both records exist in the system, but ‘B’ is visible, while ‘A’ is not.
  • A deleted or invisible record is also referred as a ‘dead’ tuple
  • One of the responsibilities of VACUUM process is to clear these ‘dead’ tuples to free up space.

Read on to learn more about various visibility indicators and how they ultimately tell us whether a row should be visible or not.

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Recursive Common Table Expressions in Postgres

Published 2024-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz explains how recursive common table expressions work:

The first two articles in this series demonstrated how PostgreSQL is a capable tool for ELT – taking raw input and transforming it into usable data for querying and analyzing. We used sample data from the Advent of Code 2023 to demonstrate some of the ELT techniques in PostgreSQL.

In the first article, we discussed functions and features of SQL in PostgreSQL that can be used together to transform and analyze data. In the second article, we introduced Common Table Expressions (CTE) as a method to build a transformation query one step at a time to improve readability and debugging.

In this final article, I’ll tackle one last feature of SQL that allows us to process data in a loop, referencing previous iterations to perform complex calculations: Recursive CTE’s.

Given that Postgres allows for materialized common table expressions, I’m a bit curious about how recursive common table expressions perform compared to SQL Server.

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Searching for Tenant Settings in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven performs a search:

You probably also use the same method as I did to search through the Admin portal and tenant settings: CTRL + F from your browser. It does the trick, but not very well. 

For example, it only searches the titles of the settings, not the descriptions.

Next to that, you also can get a lof matches that you have to scroll or loop through, which makes it not very clear because more often than not, you don’t know in what section of the tenant settings you ended up.

Read on for an alternative method of searching. Or, I guess, two of them because without Nicky’s post, it can be easy to confuse the two search boxes.

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Getting the Nth Row from a Data Frame

Published 2024-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson takes a slice:

Explanation: – We use nrow(my_df) to get the total number of rows in the data frame. – Then, we use indexing ([nrow(my_df), ]) to extract the last row.

Read on for a simple example of getting the last row using base R, dplyr, and data.table. Then, we kick it up a notch to get the second-to-last row, with the idea being that you could substitute “second-to-last” with any arbitrary number.

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Enterprise Agreements and Transitioning from Power BI P SKUs to Fabric F SKUs

Published 2024-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld talks licensing:

To facilitate a smooth transition from Power BI to Fabric (new capabilities), Microsoft ensured customers could access these new Fabric workloads as well as Copilot for Power BI on their existing Power BI Premium capacity P SKUs.

However, with the introduction of Azure-billed pay-as-you-go and annual reservation F SKUs for Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft recently announced the eventual retirement of the Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs that needs to consider an organization’s Enterprise Agreement (EA) timing.

Read on to learn more, especially if you currently have a Power BI Premium P1 (or higher) SKU.

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sp_CheckSecurity

Published 2024-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci announces a new tool:

Maybe you have some scripts you found on the internet to check some SQL Server security settings or look for odd permissions. Or maybe you don’t. Well, sp_CheckSecurity checks about 40 different objects, configurations, and permissions for possible issues. You can read more details about it on the sp_CheckSecurity page.

I’m glad to see a new tool in the security space. Chris Bell used to have sp_woxcompliant when he was still consulting, but that’s lost to history now (though I do have a copy on my PC, as one does). You can run CIS checks in dbachecks and Chrissy LeMaire has a Powershell module for DISA STIG auditing, but I’m not sure how easy that is for a DBA or consultant to use.

H/T Jeff Iannucci, who gave me the friendly reminder to add the blog.

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