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Category: Administration

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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Postgres and NUMA

Published 2024-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Annie Ghazali follows up on a Chris Travers webinar:

Q1. At what point we need to focus on ensuring huge_pages in PostgreSQL?

There are a couple of factors here. The first is, that if you’re able to show that you have multiple NUMA domains, it will almost always be a win performance-wise. But it becomes critical at the point where you start seeing that the checkpointer is running at 100 percent CPU load, and none of your queries are running at 100 percent CPU load, especially if you don’t have a lot of IO weight. That’s a really good indication that you’ve hit a point where it’s now a heavy bottleneck, and that’s a point where it’s starting to become something where you’re going to see a very large win out of it. 

Read on to see this full answer, as well as answers to questions around why you might not want to disable NUMA support and what NUMA does to swap space recommendations.

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Proper Logging of SQL Agent Job Outputs

Published 2024-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand hits on an annoyance of mine:

If you haven’t migrated your workloads to a managed database platform yet, you’re probably still relying on SQL Server Agent for various maintenance and other scheduled tasks. Most of the time, these processes just work. But when it’s time to troubleshoot, it can be cumbersome to get to the root of some problems. In this post, I’ll share some ideas to help you minimize the level of annoyance and tedium when you have to figure out what went wrong with the execution of a job.

Recently, I was investigating a job that ran a stored procedure against multiple databases in sequence, and ultimately failed. Here was the output of the job step as seen in Management Studio’s View Job History dialog:

Read on for a few tips to help with SQL Agent job logging.

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Dropping Extra tempdb Files

Published 2024-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea doesn’t want to restart SQL Server:

This is a brief post containing a script you can use to delete extra tempdb data files and avoid the “file not empty” (Msg 5042) error.

I’ve occasionally ran into situations where an instance is configured with more than the recommended number of tempdb data files.

If you’re dealing with more than a couple of extra files it can get annoying, especially on a busy instance.

Read on for the script and how you can use it on busy and not-so-busy instances.

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Reading Azure SQL Audit Logs from Azure Storage

Published 2024-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Changchien covers a strange scenario:

When you read an Azure SQL Database audit log from Azure Storage using sys.fn_get_audit_file, you might encounter a situation where the audit log appears non-empty, but the query still returns an empty result. This discrepancy can be puzzling, especially when the official documentation doesn’t explicitly mention any limitations or requirements for the sys.fn_get_audit_file system function.

In this post, I will shed light on these limitations and demonstrate them to provide clarity.

Read on to see when this might happen and what you can do about it.

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Restoring a Tablespace using Barman on Windows

Published 2024-03-08 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq restores a database:

I recently had the opportunity to contribute to a customer project, where the objective was to establish a system for PostgreSQL full backups and seamless restoration. Considering Barman’s successful functionality on Linux, we decided to explore its compatibility with Windows. Secondly, no other tool claims to work on Windows to take backups and perform a restore

From official documentation it is mentioned that: 
Backup of a PostgreSQL server on Windows is possible, but it is still experimental because it is not yet part of our continuous integration system.

Click through for the walkthrough.

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