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Category: Administration

Using Powershell to Browse Azure Capabilities

Published 2024-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kay Sauter does some digging:

In 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.

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sp_delete_backuphistory Removes Restore History Too

Published 2024-07-09 by Kevin Feasel

Steve 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.

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Have a Recovery Strategy

Published 2024-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron 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 CHECKDB against 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.

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Limiting Jobs to the Primary Replica of an AG

Published 2024-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chad 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.

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Export Azure SQL DB to Blob Storage

Published 2024-07-03 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine 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.

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Suspend and Resume Microsoft Fabric Capacity

Published 2024-07-03 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt saves some cash:

With only a limited budget for exploring and testing new tools, I had to figure out how to use my budget efficiently. Therefore, before making any decisions, I looked at the Microsoft Fabric pricing and possibilities.

If you want to take a look at the Microsoft Fabric pricing models, you can find an overview via the following link: Microsoft Fabric – Pricing | Microsoft Azure

To avoid any surprises and to be as cost-effective as possible, I created an easy Python script that I can use to pause and start my Microsoft Fabric capacity, or better said resume and suspend.

I highly recommend this for any organization that does not need 24/7 uptime for Fabric capacity. If you run your system 12 hours a day instead of 24, it takes your F64 capacity from $8k a month to $4k.

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Postgres Tuning Settings

Published 2024-07-03 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq shares a few tips:

PostgreSQL is a widely used database known for its robust performance and reliability. To get the most out of PostgreSQL, tuning its parameters is crucial.

In this blog, we will explore the various PostgreSQL performance-related parameters and how to tune them effectively. By measuring Transactions Per Second (TPS) before and after tuning, and analyzing the results, we will demonstrate the significant impact of tuning on PostgreSQL performance.

Click through for some of the sorts of settings you might want to review. In Semab’s case, a simple server achieved nearly 30% better throughput after making these changes, so that’s not bad for the level of effort.

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