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Author: Kevin Feasel

Always Encrypted And Memory-Optimized Tables

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni tests whether Always Encrypted works on memory-optimized tables in SQL Server 2016:

Last week was the PASS Summit, which is the biggest confab of SQL Server professionals on the planet (and educational as ever), Denny Cherry  (b|t) and I ran into Bob Ward (b|t) of Microsoft and of 500 level internals presentations. And for the first time ever, Bob asked us a question about SQL Server—of course we didn’t know the answer of the top of our heads, but we felt obligated to research it like we’ve made Bob do so many times. Anyone, the question came up a Bob’s internals session on Hekaton (In-Memory OLTP) and whether it supported the new Always Encrypted feature in SQL Server 2016. I checked books online, but could not find a clear answer, so I fired up SSMS and setup a quick demo.

Click through for scripts and the answer.

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The Halloween Problem

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher explains the Halloween Problem:

What is The Halloween Problem?
This is a bit more complicated. Let’s say you are trying to give a 10% raise to everyone who makes less than $25k.

Couple of quick notes here. This is a common example because this in fact the problem that exposed the issue. Also, while UPDATEs are probably the easiest way to explain what’s going on, it can affect any type of write.

So back to our update statement. There are several ways this could be implemented. I’m going to use pseudo T-SQL to demonstrate a couple and explain each.

This has certain implications as you can see in the linked Paul White series.  These implications typically mean slower performance (e.g., by forcing spooling) but getting rid of a potentially nasty problem.

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On-Prem Power BI

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck looks at the preview of Power BI integration inside Reporting Services:

  • one thing that I am missing, is when you are rendering the report that there is an “edit report” button that takes you to Power BI Desktop. A bit like in PowerBI.com, where you can also go to edit mode if you have the correct permissions.

  • by the way, if you truly want to test it locally, you can download the .vhd file (the virtual hard disk) and run it in your own HyperV environment.

All in all it looks very nice for a first preview. Currently only SSAS is supported and custom visualizations are not, but I guess the SSRS team will surprise us with more features soon. Great job SSRS team!

Lots of interesting thoughts here, so check it out.

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UDL Files To Test Connectivity

Published 2016-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Marek Masko shows how to test a database connection without having any database tools:

UDL extension stands for Universal Data Link. These files are used by Data Link API which exposes a user interface to create and manage OLE DB connections. This functionality was introduced in Windows OS at least in Windows 95, maybe even earlier. That means you can use it on every Windows machine you work on. You no longer need to worry about additional tools.

Sometimes you need a creative solution to a policy-induced problem.

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Cached Azure Analysis Services Logins

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows how to log into Azure Analysis Services from Management Studio as a different user:

When Azure Analysis Services was announced I had to try it out right away. Of course I didn’t read the instructions properly so when I tried to log in to my Azure Analysis Services instance from SQL Server Management Studio, like an idiot I logged in with the wrong username. The problem is that once you’ve done this, with current versions of SQL Server Management Studio there’s no way of logging out and logging in as a different user. Luckily Igor Uzhviev of Microsoft had a solution for me and I thought I’d share it for anyone else who’s made the same mistake. Here’s what you need to do:

This seems a bit much, but should just be a temporary workaround.

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Benford’s Law

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun is starting a series on fraud analysis and starts with Benford’s Law:

One of the samples Microsoft provided with release of new SQL Server 2016 was using simple logic of Benford’s law. This law works great with naturally occurring numbers and can be applied across any kind of problem. By naturally occurring, it is meant a number that is not generated generically such as a page number in a book, incremented number in your SQL Table, sequence number of any kind, but numbers that are occurring irrespective from each other, in nature (length or width of trees, mountains, rivers), length of the roads in the cities, addresses in your home town, city/country populations, etc. The law calculates the log distribution of numbers from 1 to 9 and stipulates that number one will occur 30% of times, number two will occur 17% of time, number three will occur 12% of the time and so on. Randomly generated numbers will most certainly generate distribution for each number from 1 to 9 with probability of 1/9. It might also not work with restrictions; for example height expressed in inches will surely not produce Benford function. My height is 188 which is 74 inches or 6ft2. All three numbers will not generate correct distribution, even though height is natural phenomena.

Tomaz includes SQL Server R Services code, so check it out.

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Finding Packages Which Use Configurations

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Fellows explains how to find SSIS packages still using the Configuration option in the classic deployment model:

Create an SSIS package. Add a Variable to your package called FolderSource and assign it the path to your SSIS packages. Add a Script Task to the package and then add @[User::FolderSource] to the ReadOnly parameters.

Double click the script, assuming C#, and when it opens up, use the following script as your Main

Bill continues on with the contents of his script task, so click through for more.

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SSIS And SSRS Practices

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Seferlis has a list of practices which he’s learned over the years:

Use Source Control

  1. For anyone who was a developer in their past life, or is one now, this is a no-brainer, no-alternative best practice.  In my case, because I come from a management and systems background, I’ve had to learn this the hardway.  If this is your first foray into development, get ready, because you’re in for some mistakes, and you’re going to delete or change some code you really wish you didn’t.  Whether it be for reference purposes on something you want to change, or something you do by accident, you’re going to need that code you just got rid of yesterday, and we both know you didn’t back up your Visual Studio jobs… Hence, source control.  Github and Microsoftoffer great solutions for Visual Studio, and Redgate offers a great solution for SSMS.  I highly recommend checking them out and using the tools!  There are some other options out there that are free, or will save your code to local storage locations, but the cloud is there for a reason, and many of us are on the go, so having it available from all locations is very helpful.

Regarding source control for Integration Services packages, that’s a good reason to learn Biml—it works much better for source control than the native packages (which change every time you open the package and contain a lot of noise).

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Filegroups And RTO

Published 2016-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Raul Gonzalez explains the importance of filegroups in minimizing RTO:

So if we don’t create additional filegroup[s] in our databases not only all the data will go to the same logical container but also in case we have to restore that database from a backup, we will have to wait until all of it it’s restored.

Imagine you have a lot of historical data for instance and there is a disaster, if you had different filegroups, one for current data and another for the historical, you would be able to get your live data first and quickly (to get you up and running), and then restore all the historical which is not critical.

To show you how, I’m going to create a database with different filegroups so you’ll see how we can do.

Click through for the scripts, as well as more information.

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