A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Dustin Vannoy has a new video:
Unity Catalog Open Source Software (OSS) is a compelling project and there are some key benefits to working with it locally. In this video I share reason for using the open source project Unity Catalog (UC) and walk through some of the setup and testing I did to create and write to tables from Apache Spark.
Click through for the video, as well as a text summary and script examples.
Leave a CommentMeagan Longoria shares some hard-earned experience:
I have a few clients that incrementally load tables from a SQL Server source into their data warehouse or lakehouse by using change tracking. Lately, they encountered some issues with changes to the configuration and the data in the source database, so I decided to share some things you can check before using change tracking as part of your ETL load or when troubleshooting your data load.
Click through for three common issues you may run into while using change tracking.
Leave a CommentIf you’ve been working with T-SQL scripts for a while, you’ve likely encountered variables. These are essential for writing scripts that go beyond basic SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statements.
Variables can serve multiple purposes: they can act as parameters passed into stored procedures, hold the results of one query to use in another, or even help debug scripts during testing (you do test your scripts before running them on real data, right?).
One particularly interesting aspect of variables is how they behave in transactions, often in ways we might not expect.
Read on for the demo. This also applies to table variables, which is why they can be extremely important for diagnosing issues before performing a rollback. You can write error results to the table variable first, then access them post-rollback.
Leave a CommentPatrick LeBlanc compiles a list:
We’ve got a lot of exciting updates this month. To name a few, NotebookUtils session management utilities, Enhancing COPY INTO operations with Granular Permissions in Data Warehouse, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Fabric REST APIs. Keep reading to hear about everything we have in store for you this month.
Click through for a lengthy update.
Leave a CommentI’m doing some sql server security privilege troubleshooting , because a customer has reported an incident – they have privileges yesterday to a certain SQL table but today those privileges no longer. I’d like to know if there is a way to identify what changes were made and by which login those changes occured. Can you supply a method ?
Read on for the answer, though Tom has an important caveat.
Leave a CommentJoe Fleming is not a fan of cursors:
So what are cursors, and why are they so bad? A cursor is a construct in SQL Server that lets you define a query which produces a multi-row dataset and allows you to step through it one row at a time. You declare a cursor in this way:
DECLARE Performance_killer1 CURSOR FOR SELECT OrderNumber, OrderLineNumber, ItemID, ItemDescription, Quantity, Price FROM Orders
You must then OPEN the cursor and FETCH the next value from it into a set of variables, then perform your calculations and updates, repeating until you’ve reached the end of your dataset. From the standpoint of someone unfamiliar with database processing, this method is fairly intuitive. You do one thing at a time. From the database professional’s perspective, it’s very painful to see. There are a few reasons why.
I generally agree with this, though there are specific queries that you cannot write in a set-based context, particularly administrative queries that have to run over each table or database in an instance. I also found that I was unable to write a proper leaky bucket algorithm implementation in T-SQL without using a cursor. But the other 99.x% of the time? No cursors needed.
Also, if you do need a cursor, use a cursor instead of a WHILE loop. It’s more to remember but you can performance tune cursors, whereas WHILE loops are about as dog-slow as they get and never get better.
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