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Author: Kevin Feasel

Beware Certain Extended Events

Published 2015-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Kehayias warns us about using query_post_execution_showplan in production:

During a recent client engagement to look at the performance problems of a production SQL Server I ran into something I hoped to never see in real life. For a long time I’ve been a proponent of Extended Events in SQL Server, and I’ve really looked forward to seeing them used more and more inside of SQL Server for diagnostics data collection, especially by third party software vendors. I’ve done a lot of performance tests comparing Extended Events to SQL Trace and Extended Events generally has lower performance impact to SQL Server performance. However, I have also found and demonstrated how specific events like collecting the actual execution plan with Extended Events can severely impact a server’s performance. Any time Erin or I talk about Extended Events, whether it is at a conference or in our IEPT02 – Performance Tuning class, one of the key things we both repeat to people is that if you see an completely unexplainable drop in server performance and throughput, check for Extended Events sessions and Traces running on the server and look at what events are being collected. For Extended Events we always demo the impact of the query_post_execution_showplan event live to demonstrate why this event should not be used in production environments ever. Yesterday I was incredibly surprised to not only find the event in an Event Session on the affected server, but also to find that it came from Idera Diagnostic Manager’s Query Monitor feature.

If you’re using Diagnostic Manager version 9, check to make sure this event is not turned on, as it’s a performance killer.

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SQL Injection Blacklists Are Bad

Published 2015-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Eli Leiba created a function to try to generate a blacklist against SQL injection:

The suggested solution presented here involves creating a user defined T-SQL scalar function that checks the input string for any suspicious key words that might indicate the SQL injection intents.

The function checks the input string against a set of pre-defined keywords that are known to be used in SQL injection cases.

I get the intent here, but blacklists don’t work.

The first line of defense that many developers come up with is a blacklist: we know that keywords like “select,” “insert,” and “drop” are necessary to perform a SQL injection attack, so if we just ban those keywords, everything should be fine, right? Alas, life is not so simple; this leads to a number of problems with blacklists in general, as well as in this particular case.

The second-biggest problem with blacklists is that they could block people from performing legitimate requests. For example, a user at a paint company’s website may wish to search for “drop cloths,” so a naïve blacklist, outlawing use of the word “drop” in a search would lead to false positives.

The biggest problem is that, unless extreme care is taken, the blacklist will still let through malicious code. One of the big failures with SQL injection blacklists is that there are a number of different white-space characters: hex 0x20 (space), 0x09 (tab), 0x0A, 0x0B, 0x0C, 0x0D, and 0xA0 are all legitimate white-space as far as a SQL Server query is concerned. If the blacklist is looking for “drop table,” it is looking for the word “drop,” followed by a 0x20 character, followed by the word “table.” If we replace the 0x20 with a 0x09, it sails right by the blacklist.

With this particular blacklist, you have a pretty high probability of false positives:  the list includes dashes, “tran,” “update,” “while,” “grant,” and even “go.”  These are tokens used in SQL injection attempts, but they’re also very common words or word segments in English.  This means that if you’re trying to blacklist a publicly-accessible search box which reads common English phrases, the incidence of false positive is going to be high enough that the blacklist changes.  But even if it doesn’t, a dedicated attacker can still get around your blacklist; as the old saying goes, the attacker only needs to be right once.

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Improve Backup Performance

Published 2015-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar on backup tuning:

QUESTION 1: HOW FAST CAN SQL SERVER READ DATA FROM DISK?

You can measure this by doing a full backup to disk, but use the NUL: option:

  1. BACKUP DATABASE MyDb TO DISK=‘NUL:’

This does a backup, but doesn’t actually write it anywhere, so it’s a measure of how fast the data files can be read from storage. If you run this, know that you’re taking a real backup: this backup can break your differential backups.

Vital follow-up:  Sean McCown’s talk on performance tuning for backups.  SQL Server backups have a few knobs you can turn, like buffercount, maxtransfersize, and number of files.

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Schedule Powershell Tasks

Published 2015-12-14 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones show us how to schedule Powershell tasks:

One of the things I needed to do with my SQL Saturday download process was run this automatically. I don’t want to remember to do this, so I decided to set this up on a schedule.

I ran a quick search and it seemed to be a simple process. Essentially I run the Task Scheduler application and then call my script as a parameter to the PowerShell exe.

Windows Task Scheduler isn’t fantastic (and they seem to mess with it in every version), but it does let you run Powershell scripts easily.  Bonus points for those of you using at for scheduling.

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Goodness Of Fit

Published 2015-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Bolton is one of my favorite long-form analytics bloggers, and his ongoing goodness of fit series is a testament as to why.

Part 1:

Goodness-of-fit tests are also sometimes applicable to regression models, which I introduced in posts like A Rickety Stairway to SQL Server Data Mining, Algorithm 2: Linear Regression and A Rickety Stairway to SQL Server Data Mining, Algorithm 4: Logistic Regression. I won’t rehash the explanations here for the sake of brevity; suffice it to say that regressions can be differentiated from probability distributions by looking at them as line charts which point towards the predicted values of one or more variables, whereas distributions are more often represented as histograms representing the full range of a variable’s actual or potential values. I will deal with methods more applicable to regression later in this series, but in this article I’ll explain some simple methods for implementing the more difficult concept of a probability distribution.

Part 2:

As I found out the hard way, the difficult part with implementing these visual aids is not in representing the data in Reporting Services, but in calculating the deceptively short formulas in T-SQL. For P-P Plots, we need to compare two cumulative distribution functions (CDFs). That may be a mouthful, but one that is not particularly difficult to swallow once we understand how to calculate probability distribution functions. PDFs[2] are easily depicted in histograms, where we can plot the probability of the occurrence of each particular value in a distribution from left to right to derive such familiar shapes as the bell curve. Since probabilities in stochastic theory always start at 0 and sum to 1, we can plot them a different way, by summing them in succession for each associated value until we reach that ceiling. Q-Q Plots are a tad more difficult because they involve comparing the inverse of the CDFs, using what is alternately known as quantile or percent point functions[3], but not terribly so. Apparently the raison d’etre for these operations is to distill distributions like the Gaussian down to the uniform distribution, i.e. a flat line in which all outcomes are equally likely, for easier comparison.[4]

Part 3:

The most well-known extension of these somewhat forgotten stats is the Jarque-Bera Test, which only dates back to the 1970s despite being one of earliest examples of normality testing. All of these measures have fallen out of favor with statisticians to some extent, for reasons that will be apparent shortly, but one of the side effects of this is that it is a little more difficult to find variations on them that are more suited to the unique needs of the SQL Server community. One of the strengths of data mining on database servers like SQL Server is that you typically have such an enormous number of records to draw from that you can actually perform calculations on the full population, or a proportion close to it. In ordinary statistics, however, you’re often limited to making inferences based on small samples of just a few dozen or a few hundred rows, out of a much larger population that is often of unknown size; the results can still be logically valid, but often only if other preconditions are met on the data (including normality tests, which are often not performed). For that reason, I usually prefer to leverage SQL Server’s fast set-based retrieval methods to quickly calculate statistics on full populations whenever possible, especially when there are simpler versions of the mathematical formulas available for the full dataset.

Steve doesn’t post very frequently, but if you have a few hours on a lazy Friday, check him out.

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Dropping Unique Key Constraints

Published 2015-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher doesn’t like the way SQL Server implements unique key constraints:

So now that we all know the basics what could possibly have gone wrong? Well I was handed an error.

Msg 3723, Level 16, State 5, Line 21
An explicit DROP INDEX is not allowed on index ‘TblUniqueConstraint.uni_TblUniqueConstraint’. It is being used for UNIQUE KEY constraint enforcement.

Someone had created a process several years ago that dropped and re-created indexes (I’m not going to go into why right now). Well this particular index is used to enforce a unique constraint and so it can’t be dropped. If you want to follow along here is some quick code to duplicate the problem.

The appropriate way to drop a unique key constraint is ALTER TABLE [TableName] DROP CONSTRAINT [ConstraintName].

I disagree with Kenneth that there’s no value in unique key constraints (I’m guessing implicit in here is “in comparison to using CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX” syntax).  There’s a semantic difference between an index which happens to be unique versus a unique key constraint.  They’re implemented very similarly, but the point of the latter is to tell anybody using the data model that this set of attributes must be unique.

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Moving The Master Database

Published 2015-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Fal shows us how to move the master database:

Last week I blogged about how you can use Smo.ManagedComputer class to update service accounts for your SQL Services. My friend Shawn Melton(@wsmelton) decided to explore the class a little more and discovered how you can change your startup parameters using this class. Shawn’s examples are focused around adding common trace flags to your instance, which is a typical practice. However, let us look at using this to move master.

A word of warning:  don’t move the master database unless you really need to.

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Migrating A VM To Azure

Published 2015-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post up on how I migrated my presentation VM to Azure:

Once sysprep was done, I needed to find a way to get the VMDK files converted to VHDs.  A blog post turned me on to StarWind Software’s V2V Converter.  It’s a free tool which allows you to convert virtual hard drive files from one format to another.  Installing this tool let me turn my set of VMDKs into one 45GB VHD.  One note is that, at least on my machine, I needed to run the V2V Converter from a command prompt; executing the app directly from the Start menu would cause the app to appear for a moment and then disappear, as though some error killed the program.  The tool installs by default in “%programfiles(x86)%\StarWind Software\StarWind V2V Image Converter\StarV2V.exe” From there, I just needed to get that big image into Azure.

This VM is really a Plan C or Plan D for me, but it’s good to have layers of redundancy.

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Filestream Garbage Collection Bug

Published 2015-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon found a bug with Filestream:

I tracked the problem back to this specific scenario: When you have a database that is part of an Availability Group, and you drop a table that contains filestream data, the filestream garbage collection does not clean up the data container subdirectory that corresponds to that table. Garbage collection will continue to clean up other items (eg, deleted rows), but the dropped table never gets cleaned up.

I’ve logged this as a connect item for your up-voting pleasure.

Go forth and upvote.

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