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Author: Kevin Feasel

Deployment As Process

Published 2016-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant argues in favor of deployment processes:

All sorts of things can happen when one person writes and deploys. I know someone who worked in the IT department for a large cell phone company. At the time, working there meant free phone service. One of the devs was a heavy user of the free phone service and so was his large extended family. His job was to maintain the billing code. After several questionable incidents at work, HR got involved and he was perp walked out of the building. Due to the circumstances surrounding his departure, his cell phone accounts were checked to ensure from this point on, he would get a bill. Although his account showed a number of active phones, his balance was always zero. The code in source control was checked and there was nothing in it which provided a reason why his bill was zero. Upon further investigation, my friend noticed the version number in production did not match the version number in source control. The code in source control was compiled and a huge balance appeared for the former employee. If someone else had deployed the code in source control, this chicanery would not have been possible.

This is an interesting read, so go check it out.

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Slack T-SQL Reference App

Published 2016-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher has a new app to pull MSDN help into Slack:

The API has to do two things: perform an OAUTH authentication, and respond to API queries. Slack uses OAUTH to authenticate that a user really does want to add the app to the Slack team. In essence, this happens in three steps. Slack sends a web request to your API, the API server then requests an OAUTH token from the Slack service (using a secret key), and finally returns this token on the original Slack connection.

As for serving up the T-SQL reference documentation, it’s just a matter of opening static text files in the web server directory and passing them with some encoding to the client. That’s it.

All of these exchanges are JSON encoded, which is trivial to work with in node.js.

If you’re spending all day in Slack, this seems like a pretty good thing to do.

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T-SQL Tuesday Roundup

Published 2016-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Yates provides a round-up for the latest T-SQL Tuesday:

The roundup is finally here, and cheers to all of you who participated. We had a great turnout this month with many returning participants along with some newcomers.

We had a wide range of topics with many great insights from everyone, but don’t take my word for it. Check out the links below and see what your colleagues from around the SQL Community had to say:

Click through for the links.

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Memory-Optimized Objects In The Transaction Log

Published 2016-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Frank Gill looks at the fn_dblog_xtp function:

Transactions against an in-memory table will return a single row in the result set from fn_dblog, while the result set from fn_dblog_xtp will contain a row for all activity. For example, if you insert 100 rows into an in-memory table, fn_dblog will contain 3 records: a BEGIN TRANSACTION, a single row for the INSERT, and a COMMIT TRANSACTION. fn_dblog_xtp will contain 102 records: a BEGIN TRANSACTION, and a row for each row inserted, and a COMMIT TRANSACTION.

One of the new columns in fn_dblog_xtp is xtp_object_id. I tried to join this to the sys.objects table to return the object name, but the values didn’t match. After banging my head against my monitor for a while, I posed the question to #sqlhelp on Twitter. Andreas Wolter (b|t) responded that a correlation can be made using DMV sys.memory_optimized_tables_internal_attributes.  Excited, I tried to join fn_dblog_xtp to the DMV, but was disappointed.

Read the whole thing.

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Multi-Tenant Database Architectures

Published 2016-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra describes a few architectures for multi-tenant databases in the cloud:

Separate Servers\VMs

You create VMs for each tenant, essentially doing a “lift and shift” of the current on-premise solution.  This provides the best isolation possible and it’s regularly done on-premises, but it’s also the one that doesn’t enable cutting costs, since each tenant has it’s own server, sql, license and so on.  Sometimes this is the only allowable option if you have in your client contract that their data will be hardware-isolated from other clients.  Some cons: table updates must be replicated across all the servers (i.e. updating reference tables), there is no resource sharing, and you need multiple backup strategies across all the servers.

Read on for a few other strategies.  There aren’t any cloud-only details here; you could implement the same strategies on-premises.

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Thinking Functionally With Scala

Published 2016-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Jacobs solves a simple problem using Scala in a few ways and explains functional programming concepts along the way:

Why is this code better than the functional approach? Note that it saves an enormous amount of time since this approach does not need to scan through all the integers! It are simply a few calculations (at which a computer is good at). All the code (the naive approach and the better approach) can be found on GitHub.

Having a solid understanding of mathematics and logic can help you come up with superior algorithms, but make sure you comment them in detail so that the next dev (who might not understand the underpinnings of your code) doesn’t replace it with a brute-force method because it’s “easier.”

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Job Hunting

Published 2016-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon hunts the most dangerous of creatures:  man job.

Finding a new job is hard. At every turn, it’s a lot of work: finding a job, interviewing, negotiating. I don’t know anyone who likes doing it. I do know lots of people who struggle with various parts of the process.

I want to share my experience, my thoughts, and my opinions. Hopefully, you can learn from my experience (good and bad). By sharing my experience, hopefully I can make life a little bit easier on you the next time you’re job hunting.

Definitely looking forward to this series.

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Finding Failed Backups And Jobs

Published 2016-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton builds a nasty query to answer an important question:

Assumptions

  1. Backup jobs that do full backups don’t overlap
  2. There’s nothing else doing full backups
  3. erm…
  4. that’s it

The reason I was thinking about this is that we have occasional-but-annoyingly-frequent backup job failures, wherein most of the databases back up just fine, but the odd one fails. (SharePoint box, I’m looking at you…) Rather than trawling through the error logs to find out which particular database didn’t back up successfully, I wanted a query to do the heavy lifting. Yes, I’m a lazy lone DBA…

The end result is a pivoted query showing days in which full backups fail.  There’s a lot of information in there, so that might be something I’d want to visualize in Excel or R, changing cell colors for failed jobs so they stand out better.  Nevertheless, check this out, especially if you don’t have a solution in place to monitor backups.

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Parallel Loading Columnstore Indexes

Published 2016-07-20 by Kevin Feasel

Sunil Agarwal shows how to bulk load with parallelism into a clustered columnstore index from a staging table:

SQL Server 2016 requires following conditions to be met for parallel insert on CCI

  • Must specify TABLOCK
  • No NCI on the clustered columnstore index
  • No identity column
  • Database compatibility is set to 130

While these restrictions are enforced in SQL Server 2016 but they represent important scenarios. We are looking into relaxing these in subsequent releases. Another interesting point is that you can also load into ‘rowstore HEAP’ in parallel as well.

The restriction I’d most like to see reduced would be the “no non-clustered indexes” part.  The rest seem forgivable for most clustered columnstore setups (i.e., fact tables).

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