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Author: Kevin Feasel

Table Designer and Query Plan Viewer in Azure Data Studio

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato announces two features in GA for Azure Data Studio:

Azure Data Studio provides users with the ability to complete operational tasks such as deploying a database, creating tables, and writing queries.  A logical next step for many users is troubleshooting or improving query performance, a task that is now easier with the general availability of Query Plan Viewer.  From the query editor, you now have the ability to display the estimated or actual plan for a query or set of queries.  This graphical plan provides a visual map to understand the steps the SQL Server engine takes when it retrieves or modifies data.  Saved plans can also be viewed in Azure Data Studio, and for enhanced troubleshooting, two plans can be compared to understand differences and more easily identify problems. 

The lack of a good execution plan viewing tool was a major limitation in Azure Data Studio (and the SQL Sentry plugin wasn’t a good fix even when it was available).

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Data Scaling Thoughts for Power BI

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley starts a series:

The Power BI service can handle a lot of data, but just because your data sources are big doesn’t mean that your Power BI datasets will also take up a lot of space. If the data model is designed efficiently, even terabytes of source data will usually translate into megabytes, or a few gigabytes of dataset storage at most. As the industry has largely made the transition from on-prem SQL Server Analysis Services and AAS tabular models to Power BI datasets in Premium capacity, the size limits in the cloud service are notable. The following reference chart from the Microsoft Learning docs shows that a P1 Premium dedicated capacity is limited to 25 GB per dataset. That’s a lot but there are Premium capacity SKUs that can handle up to 400 GB of compressed data in an in-memory data model.

Click through for Paul’s introductory thoughts and stay tuned for part 2.

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Azure Data Studio November Update

Published 2022-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Timi Oshin and Erin Stellato have an update for us:

In this release of Azure Data Studio, we have exciting news to share across several of our core features and extensions. The first is the announcement of the general availability of Table Designer and Query Plan Viewer. We would like to extend a huge thank you to our engineering teams who have worked tirelessly over the past few months on improvements to these features. We would also like to thank the MVPs and community members who provided feedback on these features. We are grateful for continued engagement from users as we work to make Azure Data Studio the tool of choice for cloud database management across multiple platforms.

There’s a lot in this release, so check out the full changelog.

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Troubleshooting Caching in Shiny

Published 2022-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Williams illuminates us on the caching process:

Caching in R Markdown is a valuable step to get your app, report or visualisation more production-ready. There are one or two potential issues to watch out for, especially when deploying a cache-enabled R Markdown file to a Shiny server – in this post I’ll go over some of these “gotchas”, and how you could address each one.

Click through for those three gotchas.

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Tips for Large Table Data Archival

Published 2022-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand follows up on a prior post:

As soon as you realize your growth rates are higher than expected, you need to plan to buy or allocate more disk space. There is no way around this—more data means more disk. You can delay the inevitable for a little bit with better compression, but this is not a long-term fix, and it can impact query performance in different ways (trading CPU for I/O).

Once more disk is in place, you can plan your growth better.

Click through for some guidance on how to plan that growth.

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“The Function Requested Is Not Supported” Errors on Availability Groups

Published 2022-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler troubleshoots an issue:

Checking the logs on the secondary, it was littered with ‘Database Mirroring login attempt failed with error: ‘Connection handshake failed. An OS call failed: (80090302) 0x80090302(The function requested is not supported).’ messages. The primary server wasn’t able to authenticate with the secondary, but why? Everything looked ok as far as I could see.

Click through for the fruits of David’s labor.

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How to Disable a SQL Agent Job via Powershell

Published 2022-11-18 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins gets a question:

I have a  SQL Server Agent job  in a disabled status. The disabled status is  applied to the SQL Agent Job and the associated schedule.  The problem is I’m logged on as a full administrator onto the Windows Server – and as BUILTIN\Administrator is defined on the SQL Server , but am able to manually override the SQL Agent Job.   

Is there a way to Disable the SQL Agent Job where I’m not able to manually override the job?

Click through for the answer.

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