A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Salman 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 closedWolfgang Strasser does a search:
Another nice feature update for administrators hit Microsoft Fabric – tenant settings got a search box!
Before the this new feature was added to the tenant settings page in October, you had one chance to search for the right tenant setting in the long list – the browser search feature. Just hit CTRL + F and search for i.e. Excel.
This is a quick quality of life improvement.
Comments closedDaniel Calbimonte adds a new user two separate ways:
Open PGAdmin and connect to the server where you want to create the new user.
In the Object Browser, expand the Server and go to Login/Group Roles tree, and right-click on the folder. Select Create>Login/Group Role option from the context menu.
In addition to adding a user via PGAdmin, there’s also a script to add users via pgSQL, and that will look a lot more familiar to SQL Server administrators.
Comments closedSean Gallardy recommends you not touch this:
I honestly have no idea how or why people tend to use this configuration option, if you know please drop me a line and let me know or put a comment below, I’m genuinely curious. When I ask people why this is set when I see/find it, I normally get a “well that’s how the last server was” or “I don’t know”. Awesome. I always like to just change random settings for no particular reason. Some days you wake up decide you’re going to go change a bunch of settings on your computer because why not, it’ll be fun.
There probably is a reason, though Sean’s speculation of “so the benchmark scores for SQL Server testing would be higher” is just as likely the cause as anything else. My fallback alternative is “one very large customer threw a lot of money Microsoft’s way to add a setting that works for them but nobody else.” There are a couple of those in the product, too.
Comments closedRod Edwards shares some hard-earned guidance:
Some organisations are more strict on security than others. Thats just the way of the world, whether it be local policy, industry policy, paranoia or worryingly…just not considering it a priority.
This is why Microsoft have to offer BYOK, no, not the famous Icelandic singer from the 90’s and beyond either. I’m (very) tenuously referring to “Bring Your Own Key” which allows customers to let the encryption key to be handled by Microsoft for their encryption purposes, but create and use one of their own.
Read on to learn more about how it works, as well as a couple of important warnings you should keep in mind.
Comments closedLouis Davidson shares some notes:
As I have dealt with other platforms, PostgreSQL has stood out to me as the platform I am most interested in because it feels like the one that is most competitive with SQL Server’s platform (Oracle is out there too, as is MySQL, and many others, but PostgreSQL feels like the balance of affordability and features that it has a similar feel enough to get started.)
There are a few high-level differences that can be confusing. A cluster is really just a server (or in SQL Server, an instance). Second, the way you execute a batch of code is very different, and sometimes this is based on the tool you are using. As you dig into how PostgreSQL works, some things will feel really normal, and some stuff will be very different from the other servers you have used.
Read on for the first post in the series, covering setup and connection.
Comments closedRyan Booz offers some guidance:
PostgreSQL continues to be all the rage in 2023, whether in “vanilla” form of the fully open-source distribution or a variant like Amazon RDS, Neon, Yugabyte, and others. If you’re interested in trying PostgreSQL but only have experience with another database like SQL Server, it can feel a bit daunting to get started.
In this small series, we’ll walk you through the process of connecting to a version of PostgreSQL locally or in the cloud. Next, we’ll discuss some options for sample databases and show you how to restore them. And finally, we’ll finish by demonstrating a few ways to connect to and query the database.
Click through for the article.
Comments closedAmit Khandelwal packs a lot into a post:
It’s time for a new blog on how Ansible can simplify SQL Server deployment, configuration, and availability. If you’ve read my previous blogs on Ansible for SQL Server installation and configuration, and the pacemaker-based Always On availability group, you know how powerful Ansible can be. Now, let’s talk about HPE Serviceguard for Linux (SGLX), a high availability/disaster recovery solution that provides business continuity for critical applications like SQL Server.
Deploying SQL Server Always On availability groups on HPE SGLX is a fully supported solution for production workloads.
Today, let’s look at how you can configure Always On availability group based on HPE SGLX via Ansible. We have collaborated with our friends in HPE to enable the Ansible based deployment for HPE SGLX with SQL Server. This feature is now available for HPE SGLX 15.10. For this demonstration, you can download the evaluation bits from the ‘My HPE Software Center‘. The Ansible bits with the scripts are available on GitHub:
Read on for instructions and what you need to make it all work.
Comments closedSalman Ahmed explains how shared buffers work in Postgres:
PostgreSQL is known for its robustness and performance right out of the box. However, different applications and different scales of data demand fine-tuning of various parameters to achieve optimum performance. One such significant parameter is shared_buffers, which, when configured correctly, can notably enhance the performance of your PostgreSQL database.
Read on to see what shared buffers are, why they are so important to Postgres, and how to figure out the right value to use.
Comments closed