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Day: January 22, 2025

Repairing a SQL Server Instance

Vlad Drumea fixes an installation problem:

I’ve needed to run the repair process in the following cases:

  • An instance or some of its components become corrupted or missing after OS patching.
    One of the most common examples I’ve ran into is SQL Server Configuration Manager being gone from the machine.
    Not to be confused with database corruption.
  • A failed or cancelled SQL Server instance upgrade or patching.
  • SQL Server failing to uninstall.
    From what I’ve seen, this tends to be a side-effect of the first scenario in this list going undetected.

Read on to see what you need to have and how to perform the task.

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Three Incremental Load Patterns with Azure Data Factory

Temidayo Omoniyi likes a good pattern:

This article is divided into three major sections—each showing the different abilities and use cases of performing incremental load with Azure Data Factory. This process can also be done in an Azure Synapse Pipeline and Fabric Pipeline.

The document contains the following:

Section 1: Copy Data Based on Last Modified Date or Latest File

Section 2: Incremental Copy Using Dataflow

Section 3: Incremental Copy Using Lookup and Stored Procedure Activities

Click through for each of these three patterns, with plenty of screenshots and step-by-step instructions.

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SSIS Deprecating Microsoft Connector for Oracle

Debbi Lyons has an announcement:

In July 2025, Microsoft will discontinue support for the Microsoft Connector for Oracle in SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). This blog provides essential details to help customers prepare for this change in advance.

The Microsoft Connector for Oracle enables data export from and import into Oracle databases within an SSIS package. This feature, available in Enterprise editions of SQL Server 2019 and 2022, will remain functional for the lifecycle of the SQL Server product. However, support for this feature will officially end on July 4, 2025. With the deprecation, future product releases will provide no further bug fixes. Additionally, it will not be supported from SQL Server 2025 and onwards.

See, and people have told us there hasn’t been anything happening in SSIS since 2016!

The alternative of using ADO.NET reminds me of when Microsoft tried to take OLEDB out of Integration Services and got the pushback that no, we really don’t want to move from a fast component to a slow component. I would expect much less pushback on this one, simply because I doubt many people are using SSIS to ferry around data in Oracle.

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Handling Excel Files in OneLake via File Explorer

Kristyna Ferris needs to get a file:

Hey data friends! This blog is to discuss an edge case I’ve run into in Microsoft Fabric. I won’t go into all the context, but the goal was to have an Excel file accessible to Microsoft Fabric without OneDrive, SharePoint, nor an on-premises data gateway. We also didn’t want a csv because we wanted to have multiple tabs and structured tables with formulas which won’t save properly in csv files.

So how did we do it? OneLake!

Read on to learn how.

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Using the OUTPUT Clause

Erik Darling has a new video. Erik mentions the best use case of this being for archival tables, but I’ll add one more: if you’re using a queue table (ignoring how good or bad of an idea this is), you have multiple processes operating on this queue table, and you want to reduce the likelihood of two processes picking up the same value, you can perform the equivalent of popping off of a queue: delete the first element(s) from the queue table and output it into a temp table. From there, you can operate on that data at your leisure, and the next process will grab some other batch of data. And if everything goes mildly wrong, re-insert that data back into the queue and let some other sucker try it. I’ve used this a few times for data warehousing processes and it works out pretty well.

The only thing I’m unsure about is how he figured out that I’m CommonTableExpressionLover11357.

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