A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
New query hint, ABORT_QUERY_EXECUTION is intended to be used as a Query Store hint to let
administrators block future execution of known problematic queries, for example non-essential queries causing high resource consumption and affecting application workloads.
Read on to see how the Judge Dredd of query hints works.
Leave a CommentBrendan Tierney has a multi-part key:
It’s a little annoying when an API changes the structure of the data it returns and you end up with your code breaking. In my case, I experienced it when a dataframe having a single column index went to having a multi-column index. This was a new experience for me, at this time, as I hadn’t really come across it before. The following illustrates one particular case similar (not the same) that you might encounter. In this test/demo scenario I’ll be using the yfinance API to illustrate how you can remove the multi-column index and go back to having a single column index.
In this case, Brendan essentially builds a hierarchy and filters down to make a single key column (in this case, a date) relevant.
Leave a CommentAaron Bertrand fires off a message:
In an earlier tip, A history of accessing REST APIs and web pages from SQL Server, I talked about reaching out to external endpoints from SQL Server, including the new sys.sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint procedure that hit the on-premises editions in SQL Server 2025. This seemed like an ideal use case to enhance our current solution for sending a message to Slack: using
xp_cmdshellto call a PowerShell script that callsInvoke-RestMethod. In this tip, I’ll describe how we changed our implementation and why it is a marked improvement for us.
When I did this same thing, I ended up using CLR, as the customer I did it for used SQL Server on Azure VMs and not Azure SQL Database.
Leave a CommentKevin Chant looks at some code from Microsoft:
In this post I share how you can get started with the custom Branch Out to New Workspace scripts for Microsoft Fabric provided by Microsoft. Which you can find in the Fabric Toolbox GitHub repository provided by Microsoft.
Read on to see how it works and some thoughts from Kevin.
Leave a CommentBrent Ozar explains why there can be gaps in identity columns:
And you use that identity number for invoice numbers, or customer numbers, or whatever, and you expect that every single number will be taken up. For example, your accounting team might say, “We see order ID 1, 3, and 4 – what happened to order ID #2? Did someone take cash money from a customer, print up an invoice for them, and then delete the invoice and pocket the cash?”
Well, that might have happened. But there are all kinds of reasons why we’d have a gap in identities. One of the most common is failed or rolled-back transactions. To illustrate it, let’s start a transaction in one window:
I have a talk on applying forensic accounting techniques using SQL and Python (as well as an older version using R) and this is one of the things I bring up. In cases where you absolutely need contiguous numbers, the best I can do for you is no identity column and a stored procedure that runs in a SERIALIZED transaction isolation level, using an app lock to prevent anybody else from calling the stored procedure concurrently, taking a table lock out on the relevant table prior to doing any real work, and hard blocking everybody else until your transaction either succeeds or fails. And I’m not even 100% sure on that if you have enough concurrency to matter.
Leave a CommentAs a database application vendor, the security and reliability of your software are core competitive advantages. To help reaching this goal, we have created a checklist which is meant to serve as a blueprint for designing data applications that are secure by default and resilient to failure, ensuring your customers can trust your product in demanding enterprise environments.
I think it’s a good set of criteria. And from the customer’s side, it’s easy to convert these into questions that you can ask vendors before deploying their software.
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