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Author: Kevin Feasel

DBA Morning Health Checks

Published 2018-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Keisler has a process which walks through some morning health checks for SQL Server instances:

A few weeks ago, a customer asked me to help develop a way to improve their morning routine of checking the health of each SQL Server. This daily task would typically take about an hour for the DBA to complete. The solution I provided him, reduced that task to under one minute.

The DBA needed me to answer these questions for each SQL Server:

1.       What is the uptime of each SQL Server?

2.       What is the status of each database?

3.       What is the status of each Availability Group?

4.       What is the backup status of each database?

5.       What is the available disk space?

6.       Are there any SQL Agent failed jobs in the last 24 hours?

7.       What errors appeared in the SQL errorlog in the last 24 hours?

In addition, the customer asked to display the results using the typical stop light colors (red, yellow, and green) to represent the condition of each server.

Click through for more details, as well as a link to Patrick’s GitHub repo which hosts the script.

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Finding Open Transactions

Published 2018-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon has a stored procedure to find open transactions:

I’m fussy. Paul’s example script is awesome, but I want to tweak it to meet my needs. I also want to wrap it into a stored procedure so that I can put it in my DBA database, and have it installed on every server I manage. In addition to the columns Paul pulls back, I want to find out:

  • More session details: host name, application name, etc
  • More transaction info: Transaction state, duration, etc
  • Filter out very short transactions: I want to filter out the noise for regular activity

There’s also a transaction state that I exclude. Transaction State 3 means “The transaction has been initialized but has not generated any log records.” A transaction in this state won’t affect log reuse. However, it could affect the size of the version store in TempDb if you’re using Read Committed Snapshot Isolation. I haven’t run into this as a problem, so I filter it out.

I used dbo.Check_Blocking as a base to create another check script to check open transactions

Click through to see what Andy’s procedure offers and also for a link to get the script.

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Smart Transaction Log Backups

Published 2018-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano has started a new series on smart transaction log backups.  Part one involves taking smarter transaction log backups in SQL Server 2017:

SQL Server 2017 introduced two fields to help with taking smart backups.  One was for taking smarter log backups, for this have DMV sys.dm_db_log_stats that have two fields log_backup_time and log_since_last_backup_mb.  With the combination of these two fields, we can put some logic in the jobs that I use for Ola’s scripts that use my config tables from my Github repository.  To support this change we will be added three new fields to the DatabaseBackupConfig table:

  • SmartBackup

  • LogBackupTimeThresholdMin

  • LogBackupSizeThresholdMB

Click through for scripts.

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Row Counts From Statistics In Azure DW

Published 2018-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer has a script to estimate row counts in an Azure SQL Data Warehouse table:

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture designed for large-scale data warehouses. An MPP system creates logical / physical slices of the data. In SQL Data Warehouse’s case, the data has 60 logical slices, at all performance tiers. This means that a single table can have up to 60 different object_ids. This is why, in SQL Data Warehouse, there is the concept of physical and logical object_ids along with physical names.

Below is a query for finding row counts of tables in SQL Data Warehouse which accounts for the differences in architecture between my earlier script, written for SQL Server, and SQL Data Warehouse.

Click through for the script.

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Embedding Base-64 Encoded Images Into Power BI

Published 2018-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Thomas shows how to embed an image into Power BI without using an image URL:

And I completely understood his concerns as I had the same issue with some of the public facing reports that I made, for eg., the US Election report that I had made 1 year back. The images for the candidates were sourced from Wikipedia and certain candidates like George Bush, Donald Trump, etc. are not displayed, because the image URLs are no longer valid.

This is where you can use my workaround to embed the images within the report by converting the images into Base64.

It’s an interesting approach when you need to solve this problem.

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DAX’s EARLIER And EARLIEST Functions

Published 2018-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington contrasts the EARLIER function with the EARLIEST function in DAX:

The EARLIER function by default refers to the row context that immediately preceded the current row context being considered.  In the examples used here there have only been 2 row contexts, the outer and the inner.  Given there are only 2, when using EARLIER within the inner row context it is always referring to the outer row context.  In this case, EARLIER and EARLIEST refer to the same outer row context.  If there are more than 2 row contexts, the EARLIER function accesses the previous row context by default (starting from the inner and moving out) and the EARLIEST function refers to the outermost row context. But did you know that EARLIER has a second optional parameter?

Read the whole thing.

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How The DBA Role Is Changing

Published 2018-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Smith spoke to 22 executives from 21 companies about how the role of Database Administrator is changing:

  • While developers don’t think they need them, DBAs are still needed for governance to make it easier to analyze data.

  • DBAs have gone from managing databases tobeing data engineers across multiple systems. They focus on how data moves from one database to another, the consumption of data, tuning of the data, and management of the data process across the data landscape is critical until it is distributed and executed automatically.

  • DBAs have moved from being focused on individual products like SQLServer and Oracle to having to deal with bringing companies’ big data implementation to life.

There are a lot of points here.  I agree with many, disagree with a few, and think that some of them are quite context-sensitive.  But all are worth thinking about.

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Scraping The PASS Budget

Published 2018-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Steph Locke shows us how to scrape a PDF, specifically, the PASS operating budget:

With tabulizer, if the data is relatively well formatted in a PDF you can use tabulizer::extract_tables(). This gives you a bunch of data.frames which you can process. Unfortunately, in the case of the PASS budget with 22 pages of tables, including tables that span multiple pages, we’re not so lucky!

We need to fall back to tabulizer::extract_text() and do a lot of wrangling to reconstruct the tables.

Steph shows her work, so click through to see the scripts.

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More On Machine Learning Services

Published 2018-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant continues her Machine Learning Services series with a couple more posts.  First up is on memory allocation:

Enabling Machine Learning Services on SQL Server which I discussed in a previous blog post, requires you to enable external scripts.  Machine Learning Services are run as external processes to SQLPAL. This means that when you are running Python or R code you are running it outside of the managed processes of SQL Server and SQLPAL.  This design means that the resources used to run Machine Learning Services will run outside of the resources allocated for SQL Server.  If you are planning on using Machine Learning Services you will want to review the server memory options which you may have set for SQL Server.  If you have set the max server memory For example, if your server has 16 GB of RAM memory, and you have allocated  8 GB to SQL Server and you estimate that the operating system will use an additional 4 GB, that means that machine learning services will have 4 GB remaining which it can use.

By design, Machine Learning Services will not starve out all of the memory for SQL Server because it doesn’t use it.  This means DBAs to not have to worry about SQL Server processes not running because some R program is using all the memory as it does not use the memory SQL Server has allocated.  You do have to worry about the amount of memory allocated to Machine Learning Services as by default, using our previous example where there was 4 GB which Machine Learning Services can use, it will only use 20% of the available memory or  819 KB of memory.  That  is not a lot of memory.  Most likely if you are doing a lot of Machine Learning Services work you will want to use more memory which means you will want to change the default memory allocation for external services.

Ginger also talks about the Launchpad service:

When calling external processes, internally SQL Server uses User IDs to call the Launchpad service, which is installed as part of Machine Learning Services and must be running for SQL Server to be able to execute code written in R or Python.  The number of users is set by default.  To change the number of users, open  up SQL Server Configuration Manager by typing SQLServerManager14.msc at the run prompt. For some unknowable reason Microsoft decided to hide this application which was previously available by looking at the installed programs on the server.  Now for some reason they think everyone should memorize this obscure command. Once you have the SQL Server Configuration Manager open, right click on the SQL Server Launchpad service and select the properties which will show the window, as shown below.  You will notice I am running an instance called SQLServer2017 which is listed in parenthesis in the window name.

Both are worth reading.

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