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Author: Kevin Feasel

Database Restores and Filestream Woes

Published 2022-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni troubleshoots a problem:

We had a case over the weekend where our automated restore process at client got hung up on this wait type, for a single database. What was the unique characteristic about this relatively medium (2-300 GB) database? It had a lot of filestream data–it seemed like the file count wasn’t that high, but my guess is the filestream data was the majority of the data in that database. When the job hung up, the restore had been waiting on PREEMPTIVE_OS_FILEOPS for over a day and still had a null value for percentage complete.

Click through to see what the problem was.

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TRANSLATE() and REPLACE() in SQL Server

Published 2022-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie compares a couple of functions:

There is another function within SQL Server that many people think does the same thing, but with a slight nuance.

Sometimes, you just need to change out one character with another. For example, you need to make a “(” into a “[” to make everything consistent.

I’ve probably used REPLACE() two (or three?) orders of magnitude more often than TRANSLATE() but that’s mostly because I keep forgetting what the latter does.

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Writing Extended Events to CSV via XESmartTarget

Published 2022-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori shows one valuable use for XESmartTarget:

In this case, imagine that you wanted to observe the commands executed on a SQL Server instance and save them to a file to process them later. Of course, Extended Events can do that with the built-in targets. However, when you write to a file target, the file has to reside on the disks of the SQL Server machine (well, actually, the file could be sitting on a file share writable by SQL Server or even on BLOB storage on Azure, but let’s keep it simple). How do you use the storage of the client machine instead of using the precious filesystem of the server machine?

Here is where XESmartTarget can help you with a CsvAppenderResponse. This Response type writes all the events it receives to a CSV file, that can be saved on the client machine, without wasting disk space on the server. You can decide which events to process and which columns to include in the CSV file, but more on that later.

Read on to see how the whole thing works.

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Mission-Critical Azure Architectures

Published 2022-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Brauer has some reference guidelines:

The AlwaysOn project strives to address the challenges of building mission-critical applications by providing organizations with a prescriptive architectural approach for the Microsoft Cloud.

It leverages lessons from numerous customer applications and first-party solutions, and applies Well-Architected best practices to provide actionable and authoritative guidance for building and operating a highly reliable solutions on Azure at-scale.

I guess marketing is calling it “AlwaysOn” again. Until they call it Always On. Or AlWaYsOn.

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Variable Typing in Python

Published 2022-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Adrian Tam notes that Python is for the birds:

Python is a duck typing language. It means the data types of variables can change as long as the syntax is compatible. Python is also a dynamic programming language. Meaning we can change the program while it runs, including defining new functions and the scope of name resolution. Not only these give us a new paradigm in writing Python code, but also a new set of tools for debugging. In the following, we will see what we can do in Python that cannot be done in many other languages. After finishing this tutorial you will know

– How Python manages the variables you defined

– How Python code uses a variable and why we don’t need to define its type like C or Java

Read on to learn how.

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Methods to Export Azure SQL Database

Published 2022-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Abhishek Shaha and Ahmed Mahmoud enumerate techniques to export an Azure SQL Database:

Export Azure SQL Database is a common request for Azure SQL DB customers, in this article we are going to list down some advanced scenarios, on how this can be achievable through various tools not limited to Azure Portal, Azure CLI and PowerShell. In addition, this article will provide alternative methods when it comes to private endpoints and deny public access.

Click through for several options.

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Scripting and Automating Power BI Backups

Published 2022-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld backs that thing up:

Basically for every data model, but in particular for large and enterprise-grade data models, it might be wishful to perform backups. Power BI Premium offers a way to perform backup and restore operations for Power BI datasets. This feature, coming from Azure Analysis Services, helps you to take a backup of your dataset logic as well as the data itself and the ability to restore in case your dataset gets corrupted or backend processes have failed. Furthermore, this backup and restore process is also a way to migrate your datasets from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium.

In this blog, I describe what is needed for Power BI backup operations, how you can perform them and how to script / automate them.

Read on for the process.

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