A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
External REST endpoint invocation in Azure SQL DB went GA in August 2023. Whereas before, we might have needed an intermediate technology to make a REST call to an Azure service, we can now use an Azure SQL Database to call a REST endpoint directly.
One use case for this would be to retrieve a file from blob storage. I explain how to set this up below.
Read on to learn more about the process, as well as a few ideas on when you might use it.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar busts out the calculator:
My friend Alex Powers (PM, Fabric CAT) wrote a blog post about cleaning the staging lakehouses generated by Dataflow Gen2. Before reading this blog, go ahead and read his blog first on the mechanics of it and the whys. Note that these are system generated lakehouses so at some time in the future, they will be automatically purged but until then the users will be paying the storage cost of these lakehouses. If you want to read more about how dataflow gen2 works and whether you should stage or not , read this and this blog.
Read on for a Python script using the SemPy library.
Comments closedJosephine Bush builds a script:
If you aren’t familiar with Terraform and its requisite bits and pieces, I have a post that walks you through them. Let’s hit the ground running. To create Elastic Jobs with Terraform, you need to use the azapi_resource, but before we go down that path, you will use the azurerm resource to create some supporting objects.
Read on for a guide covering requirements and setup.
Comments closedInfant Arockiaraj gives people an idea of where to look:
Based on our extensive experience with customers using SQL on Linux, we have compiled a guide outlining fundamental troubleshooting steps and available tools to assist in resolving SQL on Linux issues. This guide aims to make it easier for SQL DBAs who have primarily worked on Windows operating systems over the years.
In this article, we will normalize three checks in Linux that we typically perform in Windows to start troubleshooting issues with SQL Server:
- System logs
- SQL Server logs
- Task Manager
Note: The screenshots in the below examples are taken from RHEL and Ubuntu machines, and while the Linux flavors are different, the commands are similar in both environments.
Click through to learn more about these steps and where you can find the files..
Comments closedIn a nutshell, Azure follows a structure called the Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Unfortunately, ARM is not human-readable, so you need to a tool to be efficient in using it. There are quite some tools available, and from Microsoft, there is Azure Bicep, Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell. Since I have done some DBA stuff in the past, and I am a fan of dbatools (created by the team here), I find PowerShell the most convenient tool to use and suspect that many will see it the same way if they are using dbatools.
Click through for the post. As of right now, the images are broken, but if you open them in new tabs and remove the extraneous “browsing-azure-with-powershell/” in the URL, you’ll be able to see those images.
Comments closedUmair Shahid looks at some capabilities in Postgres:
This blog aims to provide an in-depth guide on auditing and monitoring access in PostgreSQL. We will explore various tools, techniques, and best practices to help you implement effective auditing and monitoring strategies in your PostgreSQL environment.
Read on to learn more about pgAudit and PostgreSQL logging.
Comments closedSteve Jones susses out a problem:
I had a customer that was looking to document a restore that had occurred on one of their systems and didn’t see it. They had concerns about SQL Server accurately tracking history across time and noted they hadn’t cleaned any history.
We dug through some of their instance jobs and found one that ran sp_delete_backuphistory. The person didn’t realize this removes restore history as well. This post talks a bit about how this works.
Read on for the full story.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand has a public service announcement:
I’ve talked about it before; you shouldn’t have a backup strategy, you should have a recovery strategy. I can’t possibly care if my backups succeed if I’m not bothering to test that they can be restored. And if they can’t be restored then, both technically and practically, I don’t have backups.
In one of the systems I manage, they built a very simple “test restore” process long before I became involved. Every night, it would pull the full backup for each database, restore it on a test system, and run
DBCC CHECKDBagainst it. It would alert on any failure, of course, but the primary purpose was to always be confident that the backups could, in fact, be restored.
Aaron now has a much more robust version of this in place, which you can see in the article.
Comments closedChad Callihan doesn’t want jobs running willy-nilly:
Transitioning from a failover cluster configuration to an Availability Group configuration brings with it all kinds of “fun” challenges. One such challenge that you may not have considered is the handling of jobs on whatever server is Primary, along with secondary servers. Let’s briefly discuss a potential challenge and an option to address it.
Click through for the example and a solution. Eitan Blumin has another solution in the comments, so check that one as well.
Comments closedJosephine Bush runs an import-export business and wants a database to “fall off a truck”:
After a data migration, we needed to decommission the old Azure SQL DBs, but we wanted to keep a copy in case we needed anything later. Enter exporting an Azure SQL DB to storage!
Click through for an example of how it works. Given that we’re getting bacpac files out, I wonder what it would look like with a really large database.
Comments closed