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Author: Kevin Feasel

Not Optimizing for Ad Hoc Workloads

Published 2022-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling continues a thread:

A few weeks back, my friend Randolph (B|T) and I collaborated a bit on a blog post about Optimize For Ad Hoc Workloads.

Now that I’m a Microsoft Approved Blogger™️ and you all have to take me Very Seriously™️, I’d like to make a few of the points here in my own words, though I highly suggest reading Randolph’s post because it’s much better.

Randolph writes for a living. I’m just a consultant with some free time.

Click through for Erik’s thoughts. Before reading Randolph and Erik’s posts, my figuring on it was that it didn’t hurt and could help, so “on” was a good default. These posts lay out a good reason why the former isn’t true and the latter is less likely than it seems.

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SQL Server Analytics Updates

Published 2022-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

The SQL Server team drops bad news on a Friday:

Today, we are announcing the retirement of PolyBase scale-out groups in Microsoft SQL Server. Scale-out group functionality will be removed from the product in SQL Server 2022. In-market SQL Server 2019, 2017, and 2016 will continue to support the functionality to the end of support for those products.

In addition to killing Big Data Clusters, they’re also killing the Java connector in PolyBase and scale-out groups. I have a blog post coming up today on the topic with my full set of thoughts. The short version is, “Mostly not bad, though losing scale-out groups sucks.”

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Sending E-Mail Alerts with XESmartTarget

Published 2022-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori continues a series on XESmartTarget:

In the previous recipe, you learned how to combine multiple Responses together and how to control their output, using filters and Expression Columns. Armed with this knowledge, you can now tackle the most complex problems, using all the available Response types. In this post you learn how to notify when specific events occur, using the EmailResponse.

This might be a “You can, but should you?” type of target.

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Goodbye, Big Data Clusters

Published 2022-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Mohammad Darab has a few thoughts:

I wanted to publish a quick note about something a little near and dear to me. As of today, Feb 25th, 2022, Microsoft made the official announcement that they are retiring SQL Server Big Data Clusters. You can read the full statement here.

It is a bit disappointing to see the lack of take-up here. Personally, I fought to get this set up in my environment but wasn’t able to convince management. I’m guessing there was a fair amount of that which led to a lack of take-up.

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Form Recognizer Updates

Published 2022-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Vinod Kurpad shares some news:

Form Recognizer continues to improve product capabilities with improved models, support for additional document types and containerized solutions that run in the cloud or on premises either connected or fully disconnected for scenarios where containers need to run in an isolated environment. Recent updates to pricing include commitment tiers for customers who have a predictable volume of documents. Starting February 15th, the pricing for Invoices and General Document API will drop to $10 per 1000 pages, an 80% reduction, making it possible for customers to use invoices and the general document APIs for high volume scenarios to significantly lower cost while providing additional value.

That’s a pretty big improvement.

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Merging Extended Event Columns with XESmartTarget

Published 2022-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori continues a series on XESmartTarget:

In the previous recipe, we wrote event data to a table in the database and each event used field and action names to map to the column names in the table. The same information (the text of the command) was stored in two separate columns, depending on the event type:

– batch_text for sql_batch_completed events

– statement for rpc_completed events

SSMS has a nice feature that allows you to create a merged column using data from several columns. Here is how you do it:

Click through for that explanation.

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Reader/Writer Synchronization in SQL Server

Published 2022-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Dorr gets synchronized:

This post is not about a specific SQL Server object but instead outlines a technique used in various locations to reduce contention while still providing thread synchronization.  There are hundreds of locations throughout the SQL Server code base that must account for multi-threaded access.   A common technique used in multi-threaded coding is a reader, writer lock.

The idea behind a reader, writer synchronization object is to allow reader parallelization in conjunction with writer synchronization.  Let’s look at a simple pattern of a single path synchronization object.  (Example: spinlock)

Click through for a bit of pseudo-code and explanation.

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