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Author: Kevin Feasel

Transitioning To Extended Events

Published 2016-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason shares his story of moving from Profiler traces to Extended Events:

Thinking back, my initial reaction was probably something like “I don’t get it.”. XEvents just seemed like a new dog performing an old trick. Even though I concluded most of the SQL pros had already made the transition to Extended Events (XEvents), and that I’d be living in the past if I didn’t do the same, I continued to use Profiler. It’s too bad–my current employer at the time had SQL 2012 across the board. I missed a great opportunity there. Before I left that job, I stumbled upon this Paul Randal post. It helped me trouble-shoot a performance issue with a stored proc. “Ok, so there’s one thing XEvents can do that Profiler can’t do” I thought to myself. (Note: I don’t know if that’s a true sentiment or not–I never investigated further.) I also recall reading at least one of Jonathon Kehayias’ (b|t) posts about XEvents, but I don’t remember which one. Profiler would remain my go-to tool for the remainder of my time with that employer.

Read this in conjunction with Erin’s request.

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Why Do You Avoid Extended Events?

Published 2016-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato wants to know why you’re still using Profiler over Extended Events:

Extended Events *is* the replacement for Profiler/Trace; it’s not going away.  I really want people to be prepared for the time when Profiler and Trace are removed from the product.  And I want to provide feedback to the SQL Server product team to address limitations that people find in Extended Events.  If the feature is lacking something, we need to work together to create change.

Thanks in advance for your help, and if you haven’t tried XE, or are looking for a refresher, then please attend my webinar next Tuesday, April 5th at 12PM EDT: Kicking and Screaming: Replacing Profiler with Extended Events.  I’d love to see you there and can help get you started with XE!

Leave a comment on Erin’s post and let her know.

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SQL Server 2016 RC2

Published 2016-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

The SQL Server Team notes that Release Candidate 2 is now available:

In SQL Server 2016 RC 2, enhancements include:

  • R Services setup – the setup process for R Services is much more integrated into SQL Server setup. There is no longer a need to manually download and install Microsoft R open and R Server if the SQL Server is connected to the Internet; it becomes part of the SQL Server install sequence.

  • SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) – This release of SSMS features an update to the Visual Studio 2015 shell bringing enhancements such as the quick launch toolbar and improved theming support.

  • Mobile reports – Brand Packages will now be downloaded to the mobile report publisher from a server running RC2 and available for use in report creation.  Basic mobile report content migration between servers is now supported.

These look like wrap-up tasks.  It’s good to see R being integrated a little bit better; that installation series seemed a bit hacky, whereas this sounds a lot more polished.

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SQLPS Fixed

Published 2016-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire and Aaron Nelson have succeeded; Microsoft has fixed the three issues with SQLPS:

In my previous blog post “Can We Get These 3 SQLPS Issues Fixed before SQL Server 2016 RTMs?“, Aaron Nelson and I asked the SQL and PowerShell community to help upvote 3 SQL Connect items. The items addressed three problems with SQL Server’s PowerShell module, SQLPS.

  • It took 3-5 seconds to load
  • It changed the present working directory when loaded
  • It produced approved verb warnings when loaded

Today, Microsoft responded, letting everyone know that the issues were addressed in SQL Server Management Studio March 2016 Refresh.

Given the reputation Connect has in the community, I’m glad to see these issues get fixed.

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Power BI Doesn’t Replace Warehouses

Published 2016-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jesse Seymour argues that Power BI won’t replace traditional data warehouses:

Pesonally, I am still struggling to see where PowerBI fits in my organization.  I am the only BI professional here, so I have to do every bit of the process from data modeling to building front end applications.  Right now, my organization has a data warehouse with some processes in the warehouse, a Datazen environment and an SSRS environment.  There is no SSAS cubes or any power users using PowerPivot to analyze data.

Data warehouses serve a particular role in an environment:  they answer known business questions and give consistent answers across an organization.  I see Power BI as a tool with a few separate uses depending upon organizational size and maturity.  I think its best use in shops which are not large enough, well-established enough, or with enough non-IT business intelligence expertise is BI developers building beautiful dashboards for business data consumers, feeding from existing systems (including data warehouses).  In that sense, it is a complement to a Kimball-style data warehouse.

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Developer Edition Now Free

Published 2016-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Microsoft is making SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition free for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members:

Exciting news! Starting today, SQL Server 2014 Developer Edition is now a free download for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members. We are making this change so that all developers can leverage the capabilities that SQL Server 2014 has to offer for their data solution, and this is another step in making SQL Server more accessible. SQL Server Developer Edition is for development and testing only, and not for production environments or for use with production data.

Visual Studio Dev Essentials is Microsoft’s most comprehensive free developer program ever, with everything you need to build and deploy your app on any platform, including state-of-the-art tools, the power of the cloud, training, and support.

SQL Server 2016 will also be covered under this plan.  Granted, Developer Edition would not break the bank anyhow, but it does lower (ever so slightly) those barriers to entry, and I think it’ll be a driving point for SQL Server on Linux.

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Updated Scheduling

Published 2016-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

The CSS SQL Server Engineers team talks about a new scheduling algorithm in SQL Server 2016:

SQL Server 2016 gets a scalability boost from scheduling updates.   Testing uncovered issues with the percentile scheduling based algorithms in SQL Server 2012 and 2014.  A large, CPU quantum worker and a short, CPU quantum worker can receive unbalanced access to the scheduling resources.

Take the following example.  Worker 1 is a large, read query using read ahead and in-memory database pages and Worker 2 is doing shorter activities.   Worker 1 finds information already in buffer pool and does not have to yield for I/O operations.    Worker 1 can consume its full CPU quantum. 

On the other hand, Worker 2 is performing operations that require it to yield.  For discussion let’s say Worker 2 yields at 1/20th of its CPU, quantum target.  Taking resource governance and other activities out of the picture the scheduling pattern looks like the following.

I’m going to have to reserve judgment on this.  It’s been in Azure SQL Database for a while, so I’m not expecting bugs, but I wonder if there are any edge cases in which performance gets worse as a result of this.

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Against The Cloud

Published 2016-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

SQLWayne is against “the cloud:”

First off, the word itself.  The Cloud.  What is The Cloud?  It’s a server that you don’t own.  You can’t touch it, it’s in someone else’s data center.  It may or may not be virtual.  Amazon’s Cloud or Microsoft’s or Google’s are several data centers with racks and racks of servers.  They are physical, just not at your location.  And they’re accessed across the Internet.  This is something that we’ve been doing for 30 years, it’s called a Wide-Area Network, just scaled up bigger.  We had bi-coastal WANs before the World Wide Web came along.

Four or five years ago, I was absolutely in agreement.  Today, I’m 50/50, being near 100% for many types of servers (web servers, etc.) and closer to 25-30% for databases.  My expectation is that those numbers will continue to shift upward as time goes on, but there will always be reasons not to migrate certain servers to someone else’s data center.

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Multi-Threaded Log Writer

Published 2016-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Adkin has a very detailed post digging into log writer changes affecting high-scale throughput:

To understand why we get this performance degradation with SQL Server 2016 RC1 three key parts of a transactions life cycle need to be understood along with the serialisation mechanisms that protect them

Chris digs into call stacks as part of his post.  We’ll see if there are some performance improvements between now and RTM on this front.

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SAN Snapshots Aren’t Backups

Published 2016-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry explains why SAN snapshots aren’t a good backup policy:

SAN snapshots, and I don’t care who your vendor is, by definition depend on the production LUN. We’ll that’s the production data.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. If that production LUN fails for some reason, or becomes corrupt (which sort of happens a lot) then the snapshot is also corrupt. And if the snapshot is corrupt, then your backup is corrupt. Then it’s game over.

SAN snapshots are a good part of an infrastructure-side recovery plan, but databases have their own recovery time and recovery point objectives.  Conflating these two can lead to sadness.

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