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Category: Administration

Azure VM Boot Diagnostics

Published 2019-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse shows us how to enable and use boot diagnostics on Azure VMs to troubleshoot why that server isn’t coming up the way you’d expect:

The next blade will show you an active console of the virtual machine.  From here you are able to determine what the current status of the virtual machine might be.  You will also noticed that you can gain access to the serial log (shown below), which will give you more detailed information about the boot process.
Once we click on Boot Diagnostics, we will then see the initial startup screens of the server:

This is useful if you have some huge misconfiguration and the server’s failing for some reason.

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BPE: The Answer To A Question Nobody Asked

Published 2019-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West is not a big fan of Buffer Pool Extension in practice:

Unfortunately there are some practical problems with the Buffer Pool Extension in 2019.
Firstly, let’s talk about the licensing contradiction with SQL Server Standard Edition. Since 2016 Service Pack 1, we have been able to access 128 GB of memory for the buffer pool, plus additional RAM for in-memory OLTP and Columnstore indexes. The practical limits of Standard Edition have been — for the most part — all but lifted. By the same token, if we can afford Enterprise Edition, we can afford more physical RAM. In other words, if we need more than 128 GB RAM for the buffer pool, perhaps we should move away from Standard Edition.

Title aside, Randolph makes a really good point: Buffer Pool Extension was one of those features which sounded great during development, but hardware quickly overtook it and made it all but irrelevant. On the whole, that’s a positive for us as SQL Server users.

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Monitoring SQL Server with Telegraf

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post up on monitoring SQL Server instances with Telegraf:

Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to put into place a free solution for monitoring SQL Server instances. I saw Tracy’s series on collecting performance metrics InfluxDB + Telegraf + Grafana, and then I saw her talk on the topic (Collecting Performance Metrics), but until I implemented it myself, I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I thought it was going to take two or three days of hard work to get done, but I had everything going within a few hours.

Let’s walk through the process together.

I keep saying this in the post, but it’s much easier than I expected. There are still more steps than a commercial off-the-shelf product but part of what you’re paying for there is convenience, so that had better be easier.

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Monitoring Entity Framework

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey loves Entity Framework:

Yes, Entity Framework will improve your job quality and reduce stress in your life.

With one caveat, it gets used correctly.

That’s the hard part right? There is tons of technology that makes things better, if used correctly. There are all sorts of programs that make your life easier, if used correctly. Yet, all of these, used incorrectly, can make your life a hell.

One nit that I’ve always had with Entity Framework is that it’s very difficult to tell what part of the code the call was coming from. You really have no idea. So when my friend, Chris Woodruff, asked me on Twitter what would be the best way to monitor TagWith queries in Entity Framework, well, first, I had to go look up what TagWith was, then I got real excited, because, hey, here’s a solution.

That “I love Entity Framework” is the lead-in to a one-act play of mine with people with pitchforks, tar, and feathers. Nevertheless, Grant shows us how we can tag code in C# and capture that data in extended events. I’d read it but I’m too busy sharpening my pitchfork.

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Automated Query Capture With Logic Apps

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal shows how we can use Azure Logic Apps to automate periodic capture of running queries in Azure SQL Database:

Have you ever wanted to capture the T-SQL, waits, sessions IDs (etc) at a specific time for Azure SQL Database? Sure there are a few ways to do this. Extended Events comes to mind but I wanted to do something different.

For this blog post I decided to use Brent Ozar’s famous sp_BlitzWho command (in expert mode) coupled with Azure Logic Apps. At a high level it is simple. At a specific time trigger the execution of sp_BlitzWho stored procedure and query it for later use.

Click through to see how to set this up.

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Creating A Big Data Cluster

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Adkin continues a series on big data clusters in SQL Server 2019:

This post post will focus on creating a big data cluster so that you can get up and running as fast as possible, as such the storage type used will be ephemeral, this perfectly acceptable for “Kicking the tyres”. For production grade installations integration with a production grade storage platform is required via a storage plugin. Before we create our cluster, with the assumption we are doing this with an on premises infrastructure, the following pre-requisites need to be met:

Read the whole thing, but wait until part 4 before putting anything valuable in it.

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Apps To Manage SQL Server On Azure VMs

Published 2019-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant has a list of tools you can use to manage SQL Server on Azure VMs:

From experience I know it’s important to know what applications you can use locally with Azure to manage SQL Server solutions. So you have the right tools for the job.

For instance, I was talking with some people at a client’s site the other day about deciding what application to use to future proof themselves.

In this post I will cover applications for use with Windows, MacOS and Linux distributions. 

I don’t think I’m spoiling too much in saying that about 80% of these are the same tools you would use for on-prem work.

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The Costs Of Rebuilding Indexes Online

Published 2019-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Tibor Karaszi explains that TANSTAAFL (There A’int No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) applies to online index rebuilds:

The time it takes to rebuild the index can be substantially longer for ONLINE. Many of us has other things to do with the database during night-time and/or weekends. Yes, these are the typical window in time where we try to find things such as index rebuilds. Say that you do it night-time and it currently take 4 hours. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could cut that time down to 1.5 hours? That would leave more time for imports, massaging of data, CHECKDB and other things you want to do. Sure, you can do it ONLINE, but it will slow down access during the rebuild. Also the more data you modify during the rebuild, the more space you need in tempdb.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies too, so that’s two important principles in one post.

As far as the post goes, Tibor makes a fair point: there is a trade-off between availability and efficiency with index rebuilds. But having worked with clustered columnstore indexes in 2014, you’ll pry the online operations in subsequent versions out of my cold, dead hands.

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Azure Kubernetes LoadBalancer External IP Woes

Published 2019-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski writes up some issues he had with creating a LoadBalancer service in Azure Kubernetes:

I logged a case with MS Support and when they came back to me, they advised that the service principal that is spun up in the background had expired. This service principal is required to allow the cluster to interact with the Azure APIs in order to create other Azure resources.

When a service is created within AKS with a type of LoadBalancer, a Load Balancer is created in the background which provides the external IP I was waiting on to allow me to connect to the cluster.

Because this principal had expired, the cluster was unable to create the Load Balancer and the external IP of the service remained in the pending state.

There were a lot of steps here; click through to see just how many.

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