A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Tom Collins has a pair of scripts:
Step 1 : Create the SQL Server Extended Event and output to and event file
Step2 : Excecute this query to read the output of the xel files generated by the Extended Events Session .
There’s not a lot of commentary around these, but the session includes blocked processes and deadlocks, so that’s nice if you have intermittent blocking chain issues.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck wants good requests:
I needed to run a PowerShell cmdlet in an Azure Devops pipeline. The cmdlet in question was New-AzRoleAssignment, but the cmdlet itself isn’t important. What is important is that I needed to pass the object ID of a service principal to the command. Even though I was pretty sure the syntax and everything was correct, I got a “Operation returned an invalid status code ‘BadRequest’” error when the PowerShell was run (inside an Azure PowerShell task):
Read on to see how Koen diagnosed and resolved the issue.
Comments closedTomas Vondra takes us through a setting:
Last week I posted about how we often don’t pick the optimal plan. I got asked about difficulties when trying to reproduce my results, so I’ll address that first (I forgot to mention a couple details). I also got questions about how to best spot this issue, and ways to mitigate this. I’ll discuss that too, although I don’t have any great solutions, but I’ll briefly discuss a couple possible planner/executor improvements that might allow handling this better.
Tomas’s points around the random_page_cost setting sound a lot like the cost threshold for parallelism setting in SQL Server in inverse: a setting whose default makes sense in a world of spinning disks at 7200 RPM, but not really in a solid state world.
Gilbert Quevauvilliers runs some tests:
It is becoming increasingly important to understand how the Power BI reports/Semantic Model that are being used in your organization are performing.
When using Fabric Capacities this can potentially be of critical importance, because a single report that is not well designed could cripple or bring down your capacity.
By completing Power BI Performance load testing before it goes into a production environment allows for scalable, dependable, repeatable testing to take place in lower environments.
Read on to see what this entails and the tool Gilbert will use throughout this series.
Comments closedJon Vöge continues a series on write-back options into Microsoft Fabric:
In that article, we took advantage of some of the built-in sample code from the User Data Function editor, as well as some great code examples from Sujata: Example User data functions for Translytical task flows · GitHub
The problem? All of these samples use SQL Databases in Fabric as the backend item.
Jon switches this from a SQL database into a Fabric Data Warehouse, and notes some of the challenges along the way.
Comments closedRayis Imayev streams some data:
In my post last week (https://datanrg.blogspot.com/2025/06/salesforce-cdc-data-integration.html), I talked about Salesforce Change Data Capture (CDC) event data streaming, where the initial event destination was file storage in Azure. But what if we anticipate a higher volume of incoming Salesforce source data or the addition of a new data feed? This could create the need for an alternative method of managing incoming events.
Read on to learn more.
Comments closedGovind Singh Rawat looks for nearby documents:
Businesses are increasingly relying on intelligent search capabilities to enhance customer experience, automate insights, and unlock the potential of unstructured information. Elasticsearch, a leading distributed search and analytics engine, is at the heart of many such systems. One of its powerful and lesser-known capabilities is support for k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) search, a method particularly useful for similarity-based retrieval in domains such as semantic search, recommendation engines, and image recognition.
This article delves into what Elasticsearch and k-NN search are, how the two are integrated, and how to configure and optimize k-NN in Elasticsearch for real-world applications.
Click through for a high-level primer on the topic, as well as a few links to additional resources.
Comments closedJosephine Bush tracks some errors:
Logging is a necessity in the database world, well, the entire tech world. You need to know what is happening in and around your databases. It’s easy to setup in Azure SQL DB.
Read on to learn more about the logging options available in Azure SQL DB, as well as how you can configure and view the log and audit results.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand has started a new series:
This is the first in a series of articles meant to provide practical solutions to common issues. In this post, we’ll talk about one of the most pervasive error messages out there:
A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections.
Read on to see what a variety of potential solutions to this problem. I was going to joke “It’s always DNS” but Aaron actually has a section on DNS in there.
Comments closedReitse Eskens tries out a tool for monitoring Microsoft Fabric installations:
Let me set the scene quickly for you. You’re working for an organisation where Fabric is in the process of being adopted or it’s already fully in use. Regardless of the number of capacities, workspaces, etc, you’re interested in what’s going on in your Fabric environment. You have questions like “Who is using the reports?”, “Who is changing settings in the Admin panel?” and “How is my capacity being used?”.
Read on for a single tool that can solve these sorts of questions.
Comments closed