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Category: Administration

Self-Analysis Of SQL Server Dump Files

Published 2017-06-28 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal walks through the SQL Server Diagnostics preview:

Notice the region to upload – If you are using a work machine I would suggest getting authorisation. The great thing here is that this is GDPR compliant.

Once ready hit the upload button, it goes through 3 phases. Upload, Analysis and a recommendation.

It sends your dump files to an external service, which is important enough to point out.  If you want more details on the product, Rony Chatterjee has a FAQ.

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PoshBot

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Warren Frame shows off ChatOps with PoshBot:

We’re going to cover the basics to get up and running with PoshBot:

  • Create a Slack bot
  • Create a PoshBot configuration
  • Run PoshBot as a service
  • Write a PoshBot plugin
  • Use PoshBot

This might seem like a lot of work, but the configuration and service are a one time thing – Writing plugins is just like writing PowerShell functions and modules!

One of my mad scientist co-workers has put together a similar bot and it tells our DBA team how servers are doing.  It’s quite useful for system reconnaissance, particularly when all you have is a phone and a trouble ticket.

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Wiggle Room Files

Published 2017-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee shows one tactic for running out of disk space, in this case on an ESXi host:

Sometimes this task is harder than it sounds. If your SAN is out of space, or the SAN management tools are out of your control, you could be stuck.

But… follow a simple trick to give yourself that last little bit of wiggle room in the event that a snapshot fills a datastore.

Add a large text file to the root of the datastore that you can delete if you need headroom! I know it sounds too simple… but it’s simple and effective.

Filed under “old but good.”

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Performance Comparison: Comparing Column Differences

Published 2017-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill has a column difference showdown:

The original post for this topic garnered the attention of a commenter who pointed out that the same result could be gathered using a couple of UNION ALLs and those lovely set-based EXCEPT and INTERSECT keywords.

I personally think that both options work and whatever you feel comfortable with, use that.

It did play on my mind though of what the performance differences would be…what would the difference in STATISTICS IO, TIME be? What would the difference in Execution Plans be? Would there even be any difference between the two or are they the same thing? How come it’s always the things I tell myself not to forget that I end up forgetting?

This may not be the most important thing to test, but it does show you a technique.

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Switching In Identity Columns

Published 2017-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher shows a way of working around the difficulty of adding an identity column to an existing table:

A friend had an interesting problem today. A really big table (multiple millions of rows) and no primary key. He then ran into an issue where he had to have one. The easiest thing is to create a new int column with an identity column right? Unfortunately in this case because of the size of the table, the log growth on adding an identity column was too much. So what to do?

Well, it would be nice if we could add an int column, populate it in chunks, then make it an identity column. Unfortunately, you can’t add identity to an existing column.

Read on for the answer.

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Using Buffer Pool Extension

Published 2017-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

William Wolf talks about Buffer Pool Extension:

With this feature, SQL Server will extend the Buffer Pool Cache to non-volatile(ssd) storage.  This will alleviate the I/O contention of mechanical disks by augmenting memory.  The BPE uses the SSD as memory extension rather than disk.  This feature can be used with standard and enterprise, but would provide noticeable benefits for Standard Edition.  According to books online, the BPE size can be up to 32 times(Enterprise) or 4 times(Standard Edition) the value of max_server_memory, but the recommended ratio is 1:16 or less.

By utilizing this option, we can alleviate some memory pressure.  To demonstrate this for me was a litte difficult at first. My laptop, as most newer laptops, has a SSD. So I plugged in a SATA hard drive externally and moved my database there for testing. If the database files are already on SSD, adding BPE may not give much benefit as the memory from BPE would write to SSD as well.

Buffer Pool Extension did end up in the Hall of Shame, but scenarios like Wolf describes exist, and in those scenarios, BPE could be a viable third-best option.

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A Filesystem For DMVs

Published 2017-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino shows how Microsoft is embracing the Linux style by creating a view of DMVs as a filesystem:

Something isn’t right…as DBAs we think of things in rows and columns. So we’re going to count across the top and think the 7th column is going to yield the 7th column and it’s data for each row, right? Well, it will but data processed by awk is whitespace delimited by default and is processed row by row. So the 7th column in the second line isn’t the same as the output in the first line. This can be really frustrating if your row data has spaces in it…like you know…dates.
So let’s fix that…the output from the DMVs via dbfs is tab delimited. We can define our delimiter for awk with -F which will allow for whitespaces in our data. Breaking the data only on the tabs. Let’s hope there isn’t any tabs in our data!

I’m a little surprised that these metrics don’t end up in /proc, but I imagine there’s a reason for that.

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Scripting Azure Resources With ARM Templates

Published 2017-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Melissa Coates has a detailed explanation of how to script out the creation and configuration of services in Azure using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates:

In many cases, you can easily provision resources in the web-based Azure portal. If you’re never going to repeat the deployment process, then by all means use the interface in the Azure portal. It doesn’t always make sense to invest the time in automated deployments. However, ARM templates are really helpful if you’re interested in achieving repeatability, improving accuracy, achieving consistency between environments, and reducing manual effort.

Use ARM templates if you intend to:

  • Include the configuration of Azure resources in source control (“Infrastructure as Code”), and/or

  • Repeat the deployment process numerous times, and/or

  • Automate deployments, and/or

  • Employ continuous integration techniques, and/or

  • Utilize DevOps principles and practices, and/or

  • Repeatedly utilize testing infrastructure then de-provision it when finished

Melissa walks through an example of deploying a website with backing database, along with various configuration changes.

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Leave ANSI PADDING On

Published 2017-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher explains what the ANSI PADDING setting does:

ON is the default and is what you would expect. Trailing spaces are saved in VARCHAR and in CHAR additional spaces added to fill the entire space. When ANSI_PADDING is off then additional spaces are not saved .. unless the column is CHAR AND NOT NULL.

So there’s the first reason to not turn ANSI_PADDING off. Most people expect the ON results and the OFF results can be .. let’s just say confusing.

Click through for more details, including how painful it is to change the setting on a column after the fact.

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