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Author: Kevin Feasel

SSIS Extensions in Visual Studio

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard fills us in on what’s happening in the world of Integration Services:

I’m not sure why the decision was made to “fork” development and maintenance of the Integration Services extension for Visual Studio 2022. Based upon experience with SSIS, Visual Studio, and the Microsoft SSIS team, I am confident there’s a very good reason. As one can glean from my appointment screenshot above, I save the links to both pages. The links are:

SSIS Pre-2022: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SSIS.SqlServerIntegrationServicesProjects&ssr=false#overview
SSIS 2022: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SSIS.MicrosoftDataToolsIntegrationServices

Read on to see what’s new in both of those projects.

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Using the Dedicated Admin Connection in SQL Server

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

David Seis talks about the DAC:

In SQL Server, a feature that often stands out for its unique capabilities is the Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC). This not just another connection to your SQL Server instance, but a special diagnostic connection designed for administrators when standard connections to the server are not possible.

Read on to see how it differs from regular connections and how you can use it.

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Explaining Filter Context in DAX

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari bust out the drawing board:

The filter context is a fundamental concept to understand in order to write good DAX code. In this article, we describe the filter context using a visual approach – we rely on a graphical visualization that represents the different interactions that exist in the filter context when you use the visual elements, filters, and slicers of a report. This is the first step to plan the changes required to obtain the desired result: these changes can be obtained by using the CALCULATE function, which removes, adds, and replaces existing filters in the filter context.

This article provides a different perspective on a topic already discussed in other filter context articles: read them to get more insights about this importance concept for DAX.

Read on to learn more about how it works.

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Using a Filtered Index to Prevent Duplicate Rows

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover solves a problem:

Have you ever needed to prevent duplicate rows from popping up in a table, but the built-in unique constraint in SQL Server falls short? I ran into a table with duplicate rows, but we couldn’t delete them, at least for now. Ideally, you would delete all the duplicates and call it a day. If life were this simple, it would be boring. We needed to prevent new ones from showing up and keep the existing ones. The problem with a unique constraint is that it applies to all the rows in a column.

You can also use a filtered index to prevent the problem in the first place. This was actually an interview question I liked to give: with filtered indexes, you can ensure each non-NULL value was unique, but that you could have as many rows with NULL as your dataset required.

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Updating Records in a Kusto Database

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon has an announcement:

Kusto databases, either in Fabric (KQL Database) or in Azure (Azure Data Explorer), are optimized for append ingestion.

In recent years, we’ve introduced the .delete command, allowing you to selectively delete records.

In February, we introduced the .update command in public preview.  This command allows you to update records by deleting existing records and appending new ones in a single transaction.

Today, the .update is Generally Available (GA)!

Click through for more details, including a link to the documentation, where you can see several examples of the syntax.

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Low-Downtime Migration Techniques from SQL Server 2017 to 2022

Published 2024-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Yohei Kawajiri describes three techniques for performing a SQL Server migration:

It is possible to configure a SQL Server Always On availability group with a primary replica running on SQL Server 2017 and a secondary replica running on SQL Server 2022, but there are important considerations and limitations to keep in mind: 

  1.  Backward Compatibility: SQL Server supports having replicas on different versions, but the primary replica must be on an older version than or equal to the secondary replicas. Therefore, having SQL Server 2017 as the primary and SQL Server 2022 as the secondary is valid. 
  2.  Database Upgrade Path: When you decide to upgrade the primary replica to a newer version, you need to follow a specific upgrade path to ensure minimal downtime and data integrity. 

Building an availability group? Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Performing log shipping? Sure, I could see that working. Database mirroring? I did not expect to read that one, mostly because it’s been deprecated for a decade.

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Bringing SQL Server Data into Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic shows us the current options:

Options, options, options…Having the possibility to perform a certain task in multiple different ways is usually a great “problem” to have, although very often not each option is equally effective. And, Microsoft Fabric is all about “options”…You want to ingest the data? No problem, you can use notebooks, pipelines, Dataflows, or T-SQL. Data transformation needed? No worries at all – again, you may leverage notebooks, T-SQL, Dataflows…Data processing, you asked? Lakehouse (Spark), Warehouse (SQL), Real-Time Intelligence (KQL), Power BI…The choice is yours again.

In a nutshell, almost every single task in Microsoft Fabric can be completed in multiple ways, and there is no “right” or “wrong” tool, as long as it gets the job done (of course, as efficiently as possible).

Nikola lays out two pre-requisites and then shows us two options we can currently use, and three potential options we currently cannot use.

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Task Scheduling in PostgreSQL with pg_cron and pg_timetable

Published 2024-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Radim Marek compares two extensions:

Working with PostgreSQL, and virtually any database system, extends far beyond merely inserting and retrieving data. Many application and business processes, maintenance tasks, reporting, and orchestration tasks require the integration of a job scheduler. While third-party tools can drive automation, you can also automate the execution of predefined tasks directly within the database environment. Although system-level cron might be a starting point, the power of the database system lies in its ability to store all the necessary information alongside your data/schema. In this article, we will explore pg_cron and pg_timetable as two distinct PostgreSQL-specific tools for scheduled task automation.

Read on to learn more about each.

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Windows Local Admins and sysadmin in SQL Server

Published 2024-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci continues a series on security:

If you have been reading along with our series of “30 SQL Server Security Checks in 30 days” posts, you’ve probably noticed a theme for a lot of these posts, where we recommend reviewing which principals have CONTROL SERVER permissions or are in the sysadmin role.

Full disclosure: I hope you aren’t tired of that yet, because there will be more of those posts.

However, today I wanted to turn your attention towards what might be considered potential shadow members of the sysadmin role. These are the members of the server’s local Windows Administrators group.

Read on for Jeff’s explanation.

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