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Category: Administration

Windows Server Core Commands

Published 2020-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher takes us through some helpful commands when working with Windows Server (particularly Core edition):

I don’t know how many of you are working with Windows Core these days but personally I think it’s a pretty cool concept. You aren’t supposed to be logging into your servers all that often so why have the extra overhead of Windows? Windows Core removes all of that and comes back with something that looks and feels remarkably like DOS from when I started with computers. That said, most of us, myself included, aren’t used to just having DOS commands any more so here are some helpful tips. I should point out that there is actually more than just DOS commands available and I’ll go over a bit of that here as well.

One other command I find quite helpful is sconfig, which pops up the Server Configuration app. That’s how you can, for example install Windows updates if you don’t have WSUS.

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Querying SQL Server Replicas Under Load

Published 2020-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Taryn Pratt points out that replicas of data can contain stale data:

Last week at Stack Overflow we had an internal hack-a-thon, or as we call it, a make-a-thon. I was on the bug-bashing team, which is the team that attempts to fix smallish bugs we haven’t gotten around to fixing, due to other time-constraints. I was tagged to investigate a bug about duplicate badges being awarded because it looked to possibly be an easy fix in SQL. At first glance it looked simple enough, but once I started digging in, I figured out very quickly it wouldn’t be.

It’s an interesting problem, but no solutions in the post. It’s a hard problem.

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Managing Systems with Azure Arc

Published 2020-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Smit takes us through Azure Arc:

This Blog post is about Azure Arc, how to set this up and get you started with Azure Arc. For customers who want to simplify complex and distributed environments across on-premises, edge and multi cloud, Azure Arc enables deployment of Azure services anywhere and extends Azure management to any infrastructure.

So Azure Arc is not a replacement for the old Azure Server manager tools! So no remote RDP or open MMC only log analytics, policy’s, CLI etc. https://robertsmit.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/azure-server-management-tools-manage-your-servers-from-anywhere-servermgmt-azure-smt/

Click through for a demonstration.

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Problems Installing SQL Server from a Mounted ISO

Published 2020-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West recommends against installing SQL Server from a mounted ISO file:

In the old days, software used to be distributed on physical media like diskette, CD, and finally DVD. Nowadays we download and install software as standalone files. Even enterprise software like SQL Server is available for download in this way, usually distributed as an ISO file. Once you’ve downloaded it, you can mount that ISO file as a virtual drive and access it as though it was on physical media.

Or you can do the right and proper thing, and extract the ISO file to a network drive or local storage first, using a tool like 7-Zip.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the problems Randolph refers to, though I’ll readily admit that Randolph has quite a few more installations done than I.

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Learning About the Power BI Activity Log

Published 2020-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld takes us through the new Power BI activity log:

What is this activity data, and how is it valuable?

The audit/activity log data contains details for every interaction that users in your tenant have with the Power BI service (powerbi.com). Activities such as viewing reports, publishing apps, modifying gateway data sources, changing workspace security, and dozens of others have records broken out by user and timestamp.

Using this data, organizations not only know who does what and at what time. You can move beyond a simple audit trail to measure how well Power BI adoption is progressing at your enterprise. In this case, adoption targets for a group’s collective number of touchpoints can be compared to the actuals obtained from the logs—even down to the individual object level. Using the logs in this manner by combining actuals to targets, BlueGranite often finds underutilized reports or other opportunities to improve adoption.

Read on for more info about what it does, how it differs from the Office 365 audit log, and more.

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Monitoring Power BI On-Premises Gateways

Published 2020-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Pries shows us how we can monitor Power BI Enterprise Gateways:

To tie all of these steps together, I put together a brief C# console application which is capable of using stored credentials or prompting for credentials interactively, then performs the 4 steps listed above. Finally, the application receives the JSON response and de-serializes it and outputs it in a friendly way to the screen (or optionally inserts it into a SQL database table.

For the basics on how I perform the authentication and API query in the application, see my blog post here.

There are a few more steps than I would have anticipated.

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Don’t Miss These Settings in Azure SQL DB

Published 2020-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through a few things administrators tend to miss in Azure SQL Database:

2. Allow Azure Services and resources to access this server setting set to on/off?

I always set this to off. I do not like it ON.

Why? Because I like to control things via vnets (maybe IPs if really needed – it depends on your solution). Nowadays you can use private endpoint connections which allow connections from within a vnet to a private IP.  Sure, you may want to use IP addresses, if you do then I suggest database level firewall rules over server level, especially if you use failover groups.

There are several good ones here.

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Using dbatools to Manage Client Aliases

Published 2020-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire takes us through client aliases and how to manage them in dbatools:

SQL Client Aliases allow you to connect to a SQL Server instance using another name. This is especially useful during migrations. Want your servers to connect to the new SQL Server without modifying connection strings within your application? Or what if you could use easy-to-remember names for your docker containers? SQL Client Aliases can help.

Click through for the commands and some quick demonstration.

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Working with App Locks in SQL Server

Published 2020-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Nisarg Upadhyay explains how to use two built-in stored procedures to take and release application locks:

For example, I want to prevent users from executing the same stored procedure at the same time. To demonstrate the scenario, I have created a stored procedure named procInsertEmployees, which inserts data into the tblEmployee table. I want to make sure that no one can access the stored procedure until the stored procedure inserts the data in the tblEmpoyee table. Moreover, I have added a waitfor delay ’00:00:15’ statement to simulate the blocking for the 15 seconds.

Application locks also allow for more complicated scenarios and you can get a bit creative when assigning resources (such as combining a process name and a parent ID).

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