A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chad Callihan makes a comparison:
I haven’t had a MySQL post for awhile, so it’s time to add some variety to the blog.
There are a couple of different ways to export data with a SELECT query in MySQL: INTO OUTFILE and INTO DUMPFILE. Let’s use the MySQL Sakila sample database and walk through some examples to compare these two options.
Read on to see when you might want to use each of these.
Comments closedNicky van Vroenhoven has a pair of posts on Microsoft Fabric administration, specifically around tenant settings. First up is a post on APIs:
Obviously, to use the Get Tenant Settings API you need to have at least Tenant.Read.All permissions, or have the Fabric Administrator role (or higher) in Azure.
There are a few use cases I see for getting these settings exported with this API:
- Documentation purposes when you have multiple Fabric Administrators
- Distributing tenant settings to users, and explaining why we (as a team of Administrators/within the Center of Excellence) made certain choices
- Get notified of the changes in the tenant settings, without having to use Microsoft Defender or M365 Security & Compliance center like mentioned here
Nicky has a follow-up post on visual cues in the Tenant Settings page:
Today I want to talk about a new little addition Microsoft made to the Fabric Admin portal.
This change has actually been here for quite a while now, but I still think it’s worth mentioning because (1) I really like it, and (2) it’s also an important change that the community, and MVP’s in specific, has been requesting for quite some time.
Radhakrishnan Srinivasan and (members of) his team added visual cues to the Admin portal of Fabric.
Check out both posts for good information.
Comments closedIn this post I cover a script I’ve put together for measuring storage write speeds in SQL Server, namely against database data files.
This is meant to help get an idea of how the underlying storage performs when SQL Server is writing 1GB of data to a database.
At this point, you might be asking yourself: “Why not use CrystalDiskMark instead?”.
The answer is simple: you might not always be able to install/run additional software in an environment. Even more so if you work with external customers or you’re a consultant. It’s a lot simpler to ask a customer to run a script and send you the output, than it is to ask them to install and run some 3rd party software.
Click through for the script, what it does, and how to run it, as well as a note on limitations and example based on three drives.
Comments closedThe more I work with Microsoft Fabric Data Factory, the more I like it.
In this post, I share one way to schedule a Microsoft Fabric Data Factory pipeline, a different way to test execute a pipeline, and then one way to monitor the execution.
This is all built right into the Microsoft Fabric UI, making it that much easier to use.
Comments closedUmair Shahid provides background info on a recent change:
“Why is DEFAULT_FDW_TUPLE_COST so insanely low?”
That was the subject of the email thread initiated by David Rowley to discuss this topic. I found the subject line amusing, accurate, and fully descriptive of the problem at hand. The discussion resulted in a commit that changed the default value from 0.01 to 0.2. Because I had previously written about postgres_fdw and also mentioned fdw_tuple_cost, I figured it would be good to go deeper into what this parameter is about and why it makes sense to default it to 0.2.
Read on to learn more about Foreign Data Wrappers (the Postgres equivalent to PolyBase in SQL Server), tuple costing, and more.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand shares some advice:
Lately, I’ve seen many people struggling to upgrade their workstation to the latest version of SQL Server. The main source of the problem is usually the web installer/wrapper, which can fail for a variety of reasons that aren’t always made clear by the error messages. Today, I’m going to walk through one way you can approach a workstation upgrade and avoid these web installer issues altogether. I’ll focus on SQL Server 2022, but most of the information applies to any modern major version. Most of the information applies if you’re installing a brand-new instance, too.
Click through for several good tips and practices.
Comments closedDustin Vannoy has a primer on system tables in Databricks:
Monitoring is important, so I’ve covered the topic a few times in the past. I’ve talked about collecting your Spark application logs and Spark metrics. These are a good way to track what is happening and what is going wrong as your code runs. In the video related to this post I focus on a different side of monitoring. The evolving capabilities offered by Databricks System Tables. I have some sample queries and links to help you get started and begin to get value from system tables. This will need to be updated (I’ll try) as new tables go into public preview status. So let’s discuss the questions I had when I first started researching this feature:
1) What do the Databricks system tables offer me for monitoring?
2) How much does this overlap with the application logs and metrics?
Click through for a video and a walkthrough.
Comments closedMuhammad Ali shows off another way to back up and restore data in Postgres databases:
Barman is a production grade tool for managing the backup and recovery process of PostgreSQL databases. It not only handles the physical backups but also provides automatic management of retention policies, compression, near zero Recovery point objective(RPO) and enables recovery at any desired point(PITR) in time within the recovery window.
Barman’s Stream Archiving feature stands out as a key component in achieving zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This is achieved by using pg_recievewal utility which continuously backs up Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) files in real-time to a designated Barman server. This capability is particularly important for applications where even minimal data loss is unacceptable.
Read on for a couple questions about it and a demonstration of how Barman works.
Comments closedKendra Little explains a problem:
If you use readable secondaries in Availability Groups or Read-Scale out instances in Azure SQL Managed Instance, you may have queries fail repeatedly if there is a glitch and statistics are not successfully “refreshed” on the secondary replica. Those queries may keep failing until you manually intervene.
This has been the case for a few years, and it’s unclear if Microsoft will fix this. There is a well established support deflection article which documents the issue and provides ‘workarounds’.
Read on for Kendra’s thoughts. I haven’t run into this before, myself, but I also don’t tend to make very heavy use of readable secondaries.
Comments closedPhil Factor discusses feature toggles for the database:
In software development the concept of feature toggles are used to selectively turn on and off features. They are, for example, used to restrict some newly introduced features to a select group to see how these features work. While this concept has been long used for user-facing application code, it is also a practice that is useful for database code.
In databases, feature toggles are used for several loosely related purposes. One common use is to separate, or decouple, rollout of database features from deployment of new versions of the application code. This allows developers to release software faster and with less risk.
The idea of using roles to determine whether a given user should see a particular feature makes sense, though I was a bit confused at first because I was thinking about feature flags: behavioral changes you slowly turn on for groups of people. This is a bit different.
Comments closed