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Author: Kevin Feasel

Error Logs with Windows Containers Running SQL Server

Published 2020-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick walks us through several locations for error logs when you’re running SQL Server on a Windows container:

So far this series has covered: installing Docker for Windows, the basic commands for managing images and containers, and creating a new image. This post will cover troubleshooting containers & the Docker application using the various log files that are available.

Depending on the type of process being run in a container (interactive or non-interactive), event and error information may be collected by the host logs, application logs, or by the Docker logs (or by all 3, in the case of SQL Server and IIS for Windows).

Read on, as it’s not just “The same places as you’d see on SQL Servers outside of containers.”

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Optimizing Cross Join Performance in Power BI

Published 2020-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb tries an experiment:

In a late addition to the series of posts that I started here a few months ago, I thought it would be useful to look at how to optimise the performance of a rare (but nonetheless useful) type of merge: the cross join. Cross joins are not available as a join kind in the Table.Join or Table.NestedJoin M functions but there are two ways of creating them in Power Query:

1. Creating a custom column in your query that contains the query that you want to cross join with and then expanding, as Matt Allington describes here
2. Creating a custom column that contains a single value, such as the number 1, on both your queries and then using that column to merge the two queries on (something I mentioned a long time ago here)

Which one gives you the best performance? 

Chris has the answer to that question and the tests to prove it.

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Testing Columnstore Data Loads on Eight-Socket Servers

Published 2020-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Obbish puts on the lab coat and safety goggles:

I elected to use a high concurrency CCI insert workload to compare performance between a four socket VM and an eight socket VM. Quite conveniently, I already had a test columnstore workload that I knew pushed the SQL Server scalability limits in terms of memory management. To perform the threading I used the SQL Server Multi Thread open source framework. I wanted all sessions to go to their own schedulers. That could have been tough to manage with tests up to 200 threads but the threading framework handles that automatically.

For those following along at home, testing was done with SQL Server 2019 with LPIM and TF 876 enabled. Guest VMs were built with VMware with Windows Server 2019 installed. The four and eight socket VMs were created on the same physical host with about 5.5 TB of RAM available to the guest OS in both configurations.

Read on to see how an eight-socket server fared in comparison to a four-socket server in this task.

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Power BI Migration Documentation

Published 2020-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates announces some new documentation:

I’m really pleased to announce that new Power BI Migration documentation that I authored is published on the Microsoft Docs site. Although it was written from the perspective of migrating to Power BI from another platform, there’s no doubt that a lot of the content applies to a standard Power BI implementation project.

Click through to learn more and follow Melissa’s link to get the whole document.

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Comparing Cassandra and DynamoDB

Published 2020-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Lewis DiFelice compares and contrasts Cassandra with DynamoDB:

In this post, we’ll look at some of the key differences between Apache Cassandra (hereafter just Cassandra) and DynamoDB.

Both are distributed databases and have similar architecture, and both offer incredible scalability, reliability, and resilience. However, there are also differences,  and understanding the differences and cost benefits can help you determine the right solution for your application.

There’s some good info in this comparison.

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Apache Flink 1.10.2

Published 2020-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Zhu Zhu announces Apache Flink 1.10.2:

The Apache Flink community released the second bugfix version of the Apache Flink 1.10 series.

This release includes 73 fixes and minor improvements for Flink 1.10.1. The list below includes a detailed list of all fixes and improvements.

We highly recommend all users to upgrade to Flink 1.10.2.

There are a lot of bugfixes in this release.

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Changing Azure SQL DB Service-Level Objectives

Published 2020-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Monica Rathbun notes that SSMS lets you change service-level objectives for Azure SQL Databases:

Sometimes as a DBA, I am lazy and want the ability to execute all of my tasks in one place. Lucky for me I discovered the other day that I can change my Azure SQL Database Service Level Object options within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) without ever having to go to the Azure Portal.

Read on to learn how, as well as what you can change.

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Building a Time Duration String

Published 2020-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Ajay Dwivedi has a function to build out time duration as a string:

As DBA, there are various scenarios where I display duration in results. More often, for visual effects, I like to convert the same duration into [DD hh:mm:ss] format.

For example, for representing the duration of total waits, resource waits & signal waits for wait types from [sys].[dm_os_wait_stats].[wait_time_ms] on Grafana dashboard by converting to [DD hh:mm:ss] format:-

Click through for the function.

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Troubleshooting SQL Server with PSSDIAG and SQL Nexus

Published 2020-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Mat Hayward-Hill shows how to use PSSDIAG and SQL Nexus. First, PSSDIAG:

Once you have worked on enough SQL Server performance issues, you start to develop an approach and lean on the same tools, to collect and present your data. I will walk you through how I troubleshoot a SQL Server performance issue, having no prior knowledge of the system. Typically, the description of the problem goes along the lines of “it was fine last week, but today queries are taking forever or timing out.”

If the issue is with one query, I will start with the Query Plan. Otherwise, when the problem is system-wide, and the SQL instance sits on top of a Windows on-prem or IaaS server, I use PSSDIAG to gather the data.

Then, SQL Nexus:

This post is the second part of how I troubleshoot a SQL Server performance issue like a pro. In Part 1, we used PSSDIAG to collect performance data. Now, we will look at how to load and analyse that data using SQL Nexus.

Before we dive straight into SQL Nexus, there are a few prerequisites that you need to install. I will confess I didn’t get this right on my first attempt so to make it easier for you, I have included the requirement along with the link of where to find it.

Check out both posts.

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Loading dbachecks Results into Excel

Published 2020-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret shares two methods of moving dbachecks results into Excel:

I got a message from a friend on Twitter last night asking ‘Is there an easy way to get dbachecks backup info into an Excel spreadsheet?’.  I sent them a couple of ideas, but figured this is a great use case that many people might be interested in. Pairing infrastructure testing using dbachecks with creating Excel reports with the ImportExcel module is a great addition to your automation tool belt. I also had ImportExcel on my mind this week after watching some great demos from Mikey Bronowski (b|t) at a user group earlier this week.

Click through for both examples.

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