A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
As part of my PASS Summit 2023 community session, I created a hybrid of two of my favorite sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats scripts. It captures data from the DMV at two different intervals, to help you diagnose SQL Server I/O related performance data.
Click through for more details and to get a copy of the script.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar talks about fallback options:
When you create a Direct Lake semantic model, by default it is in Direct Lake mode, i.e. you will directly query the delta table from the lakehouse/warehouse. This is what we want because the query performance will be very much comparable to the import mode. However, under certain circumstances, the DAX query can fallback to DirectQuery if Direct Lake limitations are hit.
Read on to learn more about circumstances in which this could happen and ways to change the default behavior.
Comments closedThis is the first follow up post from: Azure SQL TDE and Customer Keys (BYOK). Microsoft?…your name isn’t down, so you aren’t coming in. (sqlrod.com) , which explained how to use Customer Keys with Azure SQL DB (and Managed instance), and some of the dangerous pitfalls that you can face. We need to know when there may be trouble on the horizon, so key (pun fully intended) to this is monitoring.
Yes, i’m rambling on again about monitoring…but I like monitoring.
Be seeing you, Number Six.
Comments closedAuthentication is the process of verifying the identity of a user or system attempting to access a database. In the realm of PostgreSQL, authentication serves as the first line of defense, ensuring that only authorized individuals or applications gain entry. As the gateway to sensitive data, robust authentication is imperative, safeguarding against unauthorized access and fortifying the foundation of data protection. In this blog, we delve into the significance of authentication in PostgreSQL, unraveling its critical role in securing valuable information.
PostgreSQL supports various authentication methods to secure access to its database. The exact methods available may depend on the version of PostgreSQL you are using, In this blog we have mentioned a few of the most used authentication methods in PostgreSQL
Read on for the listing and some ideas on how to use the various options.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi doesn’t want to forget to turn off the power at night:
In the previous blog post, I explained Microsoft Fabric capacities, shedding light on diverse capacity options and how they influence data projects. We delved into Capacity Units (CUs), pricing nuances, and practical cost control methods, including manually scaling and pausing Fabric capacity. Now, we’re taking the next step in our Microsoft Fabric journey by exploring the possibility of automating the pause and resume process. In this blog post, we’ll unlock the secrets to seamlessly managing your Fabric Capacity with automation that helps us save time and resources while optimising the usage of data and analytics workloads.
Right off the bat, this is a rather long blog, so I added a bonus section at the end for those who are reading from the beginning to the end. With that, let’s dive in!
To spoil the bonus a little bit, Soheil shows us not only how to turn things on and off on a schedule, but also how to ignore certain days of the week. Read the whole thing to get that.
Comments closedVolker Bachmann gets an e-mail:
As the second article in the dbatools Quickies series, I would like to introduce another mail script that sends an email when databases on the servers examined are offline.
Unfortunately, it happens every now and then that databases are briefly taken offline but then forgotten. Here we receive weekly emails with all databases that are offline and where we can then follow up. If no database is offline, we will still receive an email with a short note.
Click through for the article in English and German, as well as a dbatools script and some additional remarks from Volker.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino has a public service announcement:
SQL Server 2022 introduces a new feature to enable application-consistent snapshot backups. TSQL Snapshot Backups enable the SQL Server to control the database quiesce without external tools. Using TSQL Snapshot backups enables instantaneous restores, independent of the size of data, for a database, group, or server backups, including point-in-time recovery.
When you use this feature, it freezes I/O. You’ll see a record like this in your error log when you execute the command
ALTER DATABASE TestDB1 SET SUSPEND_FOR_SNAPSHOT_BACKUP = ON. This blog post will show you that the I/O freeze is just for write operations. You can continue to read from the database during this frozen state.
Read on to understand what’s going on, what “frozen” really means, and why this is a huge improvement over the classic behavior of the volume snapshot service.
Comments closedPaul White was assured that there would be no math:
This is all very familiar, of course, but it is also dumb. Why on earth should we have to worry about internal formulas? It seems ridiculous to have to provision or grow a transaction log in pieces just to get a reasonable VLF outcome.
Wouldn’t it be better to be able to specify a fixed size for VLFs instead?
Starting with SQL Server 2022, there is now a way though it is undocumented and unsupported for the time being at least.
Read on to see what that option is, how it works, and what the limitations are. Looking at the side effects, I’d say this is probably not something you want to jump on right now.
Comments closedSalman Ahmed gives us a 10,000 foot view of two topics:
When it comes to managing large and complex databases in PostgreSQL, an important decision you’ll face is how to optimize your data storage and retrieval strategies. Two common techniques for improving database performance and manageability are indexing and partitioning in PostgreSQL.
Read on for a quick overview of each topic, including the variety of index types and partitioning strategies available.
Comments closedVolker Bachmann has a script for us:
I will publish short PowerShell scripts with dbatools in loose order that will help with simple tasks or checks on multiple systems.
I would like to start with a script that lists hard drives that have less than a certain percentage of free space left, here 10%.
These are summarized in an email and sent as a list.
Click through for the script, as well as quick German and English explanations.
Comments closed