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Author: Kevin Feasel

Life Lessons Learned

Published 2017-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy shares a few lessons learned from painful experience:

A couple of times, I’ve had under-performing VMs running SQL Server. As I hadn’t been involved in the configuration, I thought everything had been provisioned properly. Turns out…not so much. Memory reservations, storage configuration, power profiles, all set up for suboptimal performance.
Lesson learned: Ask your VMWare admin if they’ve perused the best practices guide and review things yourself before going down the rabbit hole of SQL Server configuration & query tuning. If the underlying systems aren’t configured well, you’ll spin your wheels for a long time.

Read on for more lessons.

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Bad Ideas Compendium

Published 2017-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Denis Gobo explains some of the learning experiences he has had over the years:

Use SQL to bring down other things in the company
The request was that support wanted to know immediately when an order was placed. No problem, we can add a trigger that populates a table and then we have a job that runs once a minute to email the support group. Sounds reasonable right? Someone decided to do a little testing…. this person created 100,000 entries…. I guess you can imagine what happens next. Yep, the email server was overloaded. We had to quickly delete these rows and truncate the table that was used to send the emails.

Good ol’ eDOS (e-mail Denial of Service) attacks…

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Pointers Can Be Sharp

Published 2017-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley describes a bad day he had:

There was a guy who needed to get his timesheets in. It wasn’t me – I just thought I could help …by making a copy of his timesheets in a separate table, so that he could prepare them there instead of having to use the clunky Access form. I’d gone into the shared Access file that people were using, made a copy of it, and then proceeded to clear out all the data that wasn’t about him, so that he could get his data ready. I figured once he was done, I’d just drop his data in amongst everyone else’s – and that would be okay.

Except that right after I’d cleared out everyone else’s data, everyone else started to complain that their data wasn’t there.

Heart-rate increased. I checked that I was using the copy, not the original… I closed it, opened the original, and saw that sure enough, only his data was there. Everyone else’s (including my own) data was gone.

As far as “oops” moments go, yeah, this is definitely on the list.  Read on for Rob’s explanation of what happened.

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Don’t Shrink Databases

Published 2017-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal lets out a dirty secret:

We are here to talk about mistakes we used to make. There is one mistake that I am going to discuss and is something that I used to do 10 years ago, obviously I do not do this anymore.

I USED TO SHRINK DATABASES

There, I said it! Why did I do this? Well I never knew any better. Why shouldn’t you do this?

There are situations where a database shrink operation makes sense.  Those cases are quite rare.

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GDPR Is A PIA

Published 2017-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Duncan Greaves explains Privacy Impact Assessments as part of the GDPR:

The processes and practices implemented by organisations should reflect the methodology of using a Privacy by Design approach to business systems. Undertaking a PIA/DPIA is not a mandatory part of the GDPR, but in doing so, organisations can show that they are compliant with the Act.

Conducting a PIA is designed to accomplish three main goals:

  • Ensuring conformance with applicable legal, regulatory, and policy requirements for privacy.

  • Determining the risks and effects.

  • Evaluating protections and alternative processes to mitigate potential privacy risks.

Worth reading if you’re based in Europe or do business with European customers.

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Windows OS Setup For DBAs

Published 2017-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Mlakar continues his environmental diagnostics guide, this time looking at Windows Server settings:

If Anti-Virus software is running on the SQL host machine there should be exclusions for the following types of files:

  • MDF – these file extensions are associated with SQL Server database files
  • LDF – these file extensions are associated with SQL Server transaction log files
  • BAK – these file extensions are associated with SQL Server backup files
  • TRN – these file extensions are associated with SQL Server trace files

All database related files should be white-listed by your anti-virus product!

If your company has some draconian policy that states every machines must have AV running on it then whitelist the database files. Most SQL machines are not outward facing and have no internet access. They cannot be reached directly from outside the network and there is little need to run scans on it.

Read the whole thing.

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Integrating dbatools Into VSCode

Published 2017-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski shows how to integrate dbatools Powershell commands into Visual Studio Code:

The first dbatools commands that I looked at are: –

These commands do exactly what they say on the tin. Pretty standard stuff for DBAs but what’s cool is how we can use Visual Studio Code to quickly and easily check that all our databases are being backed up and have a recent (good) CHECK DB.

I’m going to setup two scripts to run the dbatools commands against my SQL instances via Visual Studio Code Tasks.

Read on to see how Andrew did it.

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Plotly And Power BI

Published 2017-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati shows how to use Plotly to generate interactive R charts in Power BI:

In the last two posts (Part 1 and 2), I have explained the main process of creating the R custom Visual Packages in Power BI. there are some parts that still need improvement which I will do in next posts. In this post, I am going to show different R charts that can be used in power BI and when we should used them for what type of data, these are Facet jitter chart, Pie chart, Polar Scatter Chart, Multiple Box Plot, and Column Width Chart. I follow the same process I did in Post 1 and Post 2. I just change the R scripts  and will explain how to use these graphs

Leila includes several examples of chart types and shows that it’s pretty easy to get this working.

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Naming Graph Edges

Published 2017-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low is trying to find a common nomenclature for edges in graphs:

Positive (Forward) Direction

I’d also like to see the tables use a forward direction naming rather than reverse (like “Written By”). So perhaps:

($from_id) the member Wrote the post ($to_id)

($from_id) who Likes who/what ($to_id)

($from_id) the reply to the main post RepliesTo the main post ($to_id)

Avoid passive voice.  That’s good advice in general.

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