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Author: Kevin Feasel

SQL Server Backups To Azure Blob Storage

Published 2018-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill shows  how to configure SQL Server to back up a database to Azure blob storage:

Note the “no blobs found” in the container.  After a successful backup, you will see it here.

Click on ‘Container Properties’ to get the URL for this specific container…this will be used in Backup and Restore statements.  Click the button next to the URL to copy it.  For now just remember where this is or copy it to Notepad, Query window etc.  When we start to build our T-SQL statements, we will need both the Access key from earlier and the URL.

Kevin gives clear, step by step instructions on the process.

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Specifying IP Address On A Point To Site VPN

Published 2018-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse shows how to force a particular IP address when building an Azure point-to-site VPN:

Recently, I got to work with a client on something interesting. We implemented transactional replication to send data to an Azure virtual machine.  This was being done to perform some testing for a project.

Given that the two machines were NOT within the same Active Directory domain, we wanted to make sure our client’s data was protected, so we utilized a Point-to-Site VPN to facilitate this.  With the client using a VPN connection, this helps to ensure that any data transmitted to the virtual machine is encrypted and secured.  Note, the process on how to configure and implement the VPN connection is for another blog post.

SQL Server replication requires the use of a server name rather than just the IP addresses. This meant that the virtual machine in Azure had to use an entry in the local host file that was pointed back to the client’s machine.

The down side?  When the VPN connection drops (it happens), the client machine obtains a new IP address upon reconnecting.  Potentially now the host file would have the incorrect IP address and needs to be updated.

Read on to see how John was able to solve this.

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The Joy Of OUTPUT

Published 2018-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson shows off some fun stuff you can do with the OUTPUT clause:

A common command in the Linux world is the tee command. What tee allows you to do is pipe the output of a command to a file as well as the console. This same functionality can be implemented using multiple OUTPUT clauses in a T-SQL statement. In this example we are going to update a few hundred records. When the update statement is run, not only will it update the MyGuid table but it will update a log table and also return the result of the update. This is accomplished by using two OUTPUT clauses.

Check it out.  I don’t use OUTPUT that often, but it can be quite useful when in a pinch or if you want to prevent scanning a table twice.

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Getting dbatools To Version 1.0

Published 2018-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Simone Bizzotto explains what it’s going to take to get dbatools up to version 1.0:

We’re looking for contributors to help us finally reach version 1.0. Currently, we are on par with Gmail’s beta schedule: a whopping 4 years. But, we’re almost there and need your help finalizing our changes. If you’re interested in helping us bring 1.0 alive, we identified four areas with 5 primary contacts on the SQL Server Community Slack:

  • Standardize param names (@wsmelton)
  • Create tests for existing functions (@cl and @niphlod)
  • Review existing function documentation (@alevyinroc or @gbargsley)
  • Prepare for 1.0 with “code style” (Bill of Health, more on that later)

As you can see, a few of us are the main reference (on GitHub and Slack, mostly) for each area.

Read the whole thing and, if you’ve found dbatools to be helpful in the past, see if there’s anything you can do to help them out a little in return.

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Zippy Base R

Published 2018-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

John Mount defends the honor of base R:

The graph summarizes the performance of four solutions to the “scoring logistic regression by hand” problem:

  • Optimized Base R: a specialized “pre allocate and work with vectorized indices” method. This is fast as it is able to express our particular task in a small number of purely base R vectorized operations. We are hoping to build some teaching materials about this methodology.

  • Idiomatic Base R (shown dashed): an idiomatic R method using stats::aggregate() to solve the problem. This method is re-plotted in both graphs as a dashed line and works as a good division between what is fast versus what is slow.

  • data.table: a straightforward data.table solution (another possible demarcation between fast and slow).

  • dplyr (no grouped filter): a dplyr solution (tuned to work around some known issues).

Read the whole thing, including the comments section, where there’s a good bit of helpful back-and-forth.

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Non-English Natural Language Processing

Published 2018-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

The folks at BNOSAC have announced a new natural language processing toolkit for R:

BNOSAC is happy to announce the release of the udpipe R package (https://bnosac.github.io/udpipe/en) which is a Natural Language Processing toolkit that provides language-agnostic ‘tokenization’, ‘parts of speech tagging’, ‘lemmatization’, ‘morphological feature tagging’ and ‘dependency parsing’ of raw text. Next to text parsing, the package also allows you to train annotation models based on data of ‘treebanks’ in ‘CoNLL-U’ format as provided at http://universaldependencies.org/format.html.

The package provides direct access to language models trained on more than 50 languages.

Click through to check it out.

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SSMS Shortcuts

Published 2018-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Wayne Sheffield continues his SSMS shortcuts series.  He starts off with a powerful way of selecting vertical columns of text.  Then he shows how to make text all lowercase or uppercase.

From there, he gets to one of my favorite features which I commonly forget exists:

We’re all used to using the clipboard in Windows programs. You copy something into it with Ctrl+C, and paste it into your document with Ctrl+V. However, did you know that the SSMS clipboard remembers the last 20 items that were put into the clipboard, and that you can cycle through all of these clipboard values? The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V will paste the most recent item added to the clipboard. Using this shortcut repeatedly will cycle through the “Clipboard Ring”, pasting that item into the document. Now you don’t have to go back and copy items again!

Next, he shows how you can drag and drop to get all columns into a query window quickly.  Finally, Wayne shows you how to create shortcuts for important queries.  In my case, various forms of sp_whoisactive dominate this:  Ctrl+F1 for my desired layout, Ctrl-3 for my queries (three for me), Ctrl-4 for my desired layout plus execution plans (four for more).

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SQL Server Internal Row Structures

Published 2018-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler gets to the guts of a row as stored in SQL Server:

DBCC page will take in a database name or id, file id and page id and return a representation of the specified page depending on the print options that you choose.

We’ve got four different print options that we can choose,

0 – Return only the page header
1 – Return the page header and hex dump of each row
2 – Return the page header and full page hex dump
3 – Return the page header, hex dump of each row as well as the details on each column

Read the whole thing.

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The Stage-And-Switch Technique For Deployments

Published 2018-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Swart amps up the complexity factor in his online deployment series:

There’s two things going on here (and one hidden thing):

  1. The first two messages point out that a procedure is referencing the column ColdRoomSensorNumber with schemabinding. The reason it’s using schemabinding is because it’s a natively compiled stored procedure. And that tells me that the table Warehouse.ColdRoomTemperatures is an In-Memory table. That’s not all. I noticed another wrinkle. The procedure takes a table-valued parameter whose table type contains a column called ColdRoomSensorLabel. We’re going to have to replace that too. Ugh. Part of me wanted to look for another example.

  2. The last message tells me that the table is a system versioned table. So there’s a corresponding archive table where history is maintained. That has to be dealt with too. Luckily Microsoft has a great article on Changing the Schema of a System-Versioned Temporal Table.

  3. One last thing to worry about is a index on ColdRoomSensorNumber. That should be replaced with an index on ColdRoomSensorLabel. SSDT didn’t warn me about that because apparently, it can deal with that pretty nicely.

I’m glad that Michael went with a more complex example—it’s easy to tell this story with a simple procedure versioning, but in seeing a larger change, you can see the rhythm in the process—it’s all the same pattern of steps over and over.

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Expanding LVM Drives

Published 2018-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee shows how to expand an LVM drive on Linux:

Next in our SQL Server on Linux series is one important question. On Windows, if you’re about to run out of space, you get your VM admin / storage admin to expand one or more of your drives, and you go to Disk Management and expand the drive with no downtime. How do we accomplish this same task on Linux?

First, SSH into your VM. Get your appropriate system engineer to expand the drive that needs to be expanded. You won’t be able to see it at first in Linux because, just like in Windows, it’ll need to rescan the storage to ‘see’ the extra space. Sometimes Windows does it automatically, and sometimes you have to initiate it manually. In Linux it only does this on system startup.

Let’s grow our data drive from 250GB to 300GB first.

Click through to see how to do that.

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