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Category: Administration

Finding Last Access Dates for SQL Server

Published 2024-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler checks the calendar:

Your boss walks up to you one morning and says, “Hey, I wanna list of all of our databases and when they were last accessed”.

If you’ve got some sort of auditing switched on or a trace or xevent catching this sort of info you might be ok, but I’m betting you don’t have any of that. That’s cool, it’s not something that I tend to monitor as standard either.

But if you’re not monitoring it, is there any way that you can get at that info?

Read on for one way to estimate it. Though I believe automated jobs would skew that result if the underlying question is, “When did a human last view that database?”

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Finding Duplicate Statistics in SQL Server

Published 2024-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz searches for clones:

Some time ago, we encountered a support case where a customer experienced significant delays in updating auto-created and user-created statistics. I would like to share the insights gained from this experience, including the underlying causes of the issue and the potential solutions we identified and implemented to address the problem effectively.

Read on for a demo to set up the scenario and the cause of the problem, as well as how to fix it.

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Parallel Vector Index Rebuild in Postgres

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq takes a look at parallel index building in pgvector:

Parallel Index Build refers to the capability to build indexes using parallel processing. In simpler terms, it means that multiple workers or threads can be utilized simultaneously to create an index, which can significantly speed up the index creation process.

When performing an index build operation, PostgreSQL can divide the work among multiple parallel workers, each responsible for building a portion of the index.

Read on to learn more about this bit of functionality in pgvector 0.6 and the performance gains you can get from it.

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Azure SQL DB Watcher and Azure Data Explorer Integration

Published 2024-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Guy Reginiano gets chocolate in my peanut butter:

Azure SQL family users can now take advantage of an enhanced monitoring solution for their databases and leverage Azure Data Explorer or the Microsoft Fabric integration. With the introduction of the new Database Watcher for Azure SQL (preview), users gain access to advanced monitoring capabilities. 

Database watcher is a new managed monitoring solution for database services in the Azure SQL family. It supports Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Read on to see how you can analyze results with Azure Data Explorer.

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Refreshing a View in SQL Server

Published 2024-03-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan hits the reset button:

I recently encountered a question related to views: what happens when you make a change to the table that a view is based on? For example, if you change a column from VARCHAR(8) to VARCHAR(20), how does the view handle that change? You might expect the view to update, but it won’t do it on its own. You have to refresh the view.

Let’s look at a mocked up example.

Click through for that example. You’d think it could do so on its own, but nope. I suppose the reason you can’t is probably related to linked server and external object references in views, where that remote resource can change schema and SQL Server wouldn’t know about it. Perhaps also the idea that a person may be authorized to change a table in one database or schema but shouldn’t be authorized to modify (even to refresh?) a particular view that references the table.

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Using Runbooks in Azure Automation

Published 2024-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards has a process for that:

Nobody likes to do the same monontonous task over and over again. Well, saying that, maybe some out there do in order to look and feel busy…but I don’t, as I nearly always have something else more pressing or fun or interesting to do. By automating those repeatable tasks, it reduces boredom, chance of errors, and stress if you’re already a busy bunny.

This is where Automation comes into play, and in Azure we have a few options. This post focuses in Azure automation.

Read on to see how Azure Automation works and how to build a Powershell runbook in it.

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Database Watcher for Azure SQL

Published 2024-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Dimitry Furman has a new announcement:

Reliable, in-depth, and at-scale monitoring of database performance has been a long-standing top priority for SQL customers. Today, we are pleased to announce the public preview of database watcher for Azure SQL, a managed database monitoring solution to help our customers use Azure SQL reliably and efficiently.

Click through to see what it offers and what’s on the roadmap for this product.

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Using Key Vault in SQL Server on Linux

Published 2024-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

Aravind Mahadevan shares information on a new bit of functionality:

We’re excited to announce that Extensible Key Management (EKM) using Azure Key Vault in SQL Server on Linux is now generally available from SQL Server 2022 CU12 onwards, which allows you to manage encryption keys outside of SQL Server using Azure Key Vaults.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how to leverage Azure Key Vault as an EKM provider for SQL Server on Linux.

Read on to see how to set this up.

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Restorable Dropped Databases Naming in Azure SQL DB

Published 2024-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Tanayankar Chakraborty asks, what’s in a name?:

An issue was reported recently where the customer complained that in their cost analysis report of their Azure SQL DBs, the db name appears appended with a comma(,) and a number. While they agreed with the DB name in the report, they didn’t understand the number after the comma and its significance. This is how the cost analysis report looks like:

Click through for a redacted version of the report, showing an example of the database in question, as well as an explanation of what this number means.

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Postgres Internals: Database Clusters, Databases, and Tables

Published 2024-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq begins a new series:

A database cluster is a collection of multiple databases managed by a single PostgreSQL server. It can be referred to as a data/base directory.

A database is a collection of database objects. Whereas a database object is a data structure used to store objects such as tables, views, indexes, extensions, Sequences functions, etc. In simple words, anything that we can create or store within a database is a database object

Read on to learn more about how Postgres lays out database files and tablespaces.

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