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Author: Kevin Feasel

Elastic Jobs for Azure SQL DB

Published 2024-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush digs into Elastic Jobs:

I know if you are a SQL Server DBA using Azure SQL DB, you’ve been sorely missing the agent. Enter Elastic Jobs to help you schedule jobs more easily against Azure SQL DB. I will cover setting up and scheduling Elastic Jobs to execute Ola index maintenance. If you’ve used Elastic Jobs in the past, there are some very nice improvements with the recent GA release, so don’t feel discouraged if you didn’t like it in the past—it’s way better now!

Read on for a deep dive into Elastic Jobs.

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sqlcmd and Self-Signed Certificates

Published 2024-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea is a trusting fellow:

This post covers a few ways to fix the SSL certificate error 1416F086 returned by sqlcmd on Linux when connecting to SQL Server.

If you’re looking for ways to fix the Windows equivalent of this error when using dbatools, check out this blog post.

It’s interesting how much controversy we’re seeing around tools like sqlcmd and (especially) SQL Server Management Studio defaulting to mandatory encryption. Having signed and valid certificates is a critical part of validating that this SQL Server is actually the one you think it is, and no intermediary attacker has swapped the certificate out with a phony one that allows the attacker to spy on your interactions.

I can understand people who are just messing around with SQL Server locally to experience pain on this, but the sheer number of actual companies—including companies using Central Management Servers, which implies having multiple SQL Server instances—with garbage-tier self-signed certificates is discouragingly high.

By the way, I’m aiming none of my rant at Vlad or this post. It’s just top-of-mind and this was as good a vehicle for rant delivery as I could find.

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Estimating Chi-Square Parameters with R

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Steven Sanderson performs a test:

In the world of statistics and data analysis, understanding and accurately estimating the parameters of probability distributions is crucial. One such distribution is the chi-square distribution, often encountered in various statistical analyses. In this blog post, we’ll dive into how we can estimate the degrees of freedom (“df”) and the non-centrality parameter (“ncp”) of a chi-square distribution using R programming language.

Read on to learn more about the process of estimation while I grumble something about Bayesian analysis being better.

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Resetting the sa Password in SQL Server on Linux

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea blames the intern:

This is pretty useful if you’ve inherited a SQL Server instance running on Linux, but the last person™ didn’t bother saving the sa password in your teams password manager vault.
Or, if you’re like me, and spin up test instances with random passwords for sa that you don’t bother saving anywhere.

Click through to see where you can find out how to reset the password, and then the actual mechanics of password reset.

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Using a Snake Draft Order in SQL Server

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand makes use of an ordering:

In my previous post, I showed how to borrow a snake draft concept from fantasy football, or a packing technique from the shipping industry, to distribute different portions of a workload to run in parallel. In the previous example, we determined a distribution order for databases based on size – though you can rank by literally any attribute (or combination of attributes). Once we’ve determined how to build out this order, we may want to store that data somewhere because, sometimes, the source of that data is not directly accessible.

Read on for tips on storing the results in a table, querying the results, and using them to drive SQL Agent jobs.

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Tips for Configuring Alerts for Azure Data Factory

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some advice:

Alerting is an important monitoring task for any ETL process. Azure Data Factory can integrate with a generic Azure event framework (Azure Monitor) which makes it somewhat unintuitive for ETL monitoring. You can set up and change the alerts using the ADF Monitoring hub.

Read on for five pieces of advice, in particular, covering how to set up one of these alerts.

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Mirroring Snowflake to Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad hogs the photocopier:

Microsoft Fabric offers an end-to-end SaaS analytics solution; however, the world is using all kinds of data sources in its implementation. Mirroring is a new functionality in Fabric that allows customers to keep their data wherever they are, but then they can use Fabric analytics solutions with the same speed and performance as if their data were in Fabric. Best of all, this won’t cost extra. If you wonder what it is and how it works, read this article.

Click through for the video and article.

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Deploying SSIS Components using Custom Components

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword forgets something at home:

Within SSIS you can make use of custom components which aren’t present out of the box. An example of some would be the Azure Feature Pack if you’re working with cloud resources.

These will let us use features not available natively. They can also provide a challenge down the line when we come to deploy changes to the project.

Here we’ll look at an example of this challenge, how to troubleshoot, and ultimately resolve the issue.

Read on for the scenario and fix.

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