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Category: Administration

Elastic Jobs for Azure SQL DB

Published 2024-04-17 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush digs into Elastic Jobs:

I know if you are a SQL Server DBA using Azure SQL DB, you’ve been sorely missing the agent. Enter Elastic Jobs to help you schedule jobs more easily against Azure SQL DB. I will cover setting up and scheduling Elastic Jobs to execute Ola index maintenance. If you’ve used Elastic Jobs in the past, there are some very nice improvements with the recent GA release, so don’t feel discouraged if you didn’t like it in the past—it’s way better now!

Read on for a deep dive into Elastic Jobs.

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Using a Snake Draft Order in SQL Server

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand makes use of an ordering:

In my previous post, I showed how to borrow a snake draft concept from fantasy football, or a packing technique from the shipping industry, to distribute different portions of a workload to run in parallel. In the previous example, we determined a distribution order for databases based on size – though you can rank by literally any attribute (or combination of attributes). Once we’ve determined how to build out this order, we may want to store that data somewhere because, sometimes, the source of that data is not directly accessible.

Read on for tips on storing the results in a table, querying the results, and using them to drive SQL Agent jobs.

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Resetting the sa Password in SQL Server on Linux

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea blames the intern:

This is pretty useful if you’ve inherited a SQL Server instance running on Linux, but the last person™ didn’t bother saving the sa password in your teams password manager vault.
Or, if you’re like me, and spin up test instances with random passwords for sa that you don’t bother saving anywhere.

Click through to see where you can find out how to reset the password, and then the actual mechanics of password reset.

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Tips for Configuring Alerts for Azure Data Factory

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some advice:

Alerting is an important monitoring task for any ETL process. Azure Data Factory can integrate with a generic Azure event framework (Azure Monitor) which makes it somewhat unintuitive for ETL monitoring. You can set up and change the alerts using the ADF Monitoring hub.

Read on for five pieces of advice, in particular, covering how to set up one of these alerts.

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Microsoft Fabric Workspace Soft Deletion and Retention

Published 2024-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld fills us in on the details:

This morning, I was looking for a specific tenant setting in the Fabric admin portal. While scrolling through a few of the tenant settings, I came across a specific one, which I like to elaborate on a bit more in detail, given I recently also had some questions around this topic from customers.

What happens if you delete a Fabric workspace? Is there a way to recover? How and for how long? Well, we now have a tenant setting to control this!

Click through for the details.

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Failover Groups in Azure SQL Database

Published 2024-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush sets up a failover group in Azure SQL Database:

In today’s fast-paced digital world, keeping your data safe and accessible is more important than ever. That’s where Azure SQL Database steps in, offering a suite of tools to ensure your information is always within reach. Among these tools, failover groups shine, ready to jump into action whenever there’s a hiccup. So, let’s explore how failover groups in Azure SQL Database work their magic, ensuring your data stays safe and sound despite unexpected challenges.

Read on for the step-by-step instructions.

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Infrastructure as Code in GitHub

Published 2024-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, we look at how to perform Infrastructure as Code in GitHub. We take a Bicep script and generate new Azure resources using it and GitHub Actions.

The video includes a very brief primer on Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and Bicep, and then gets into how you can use GitHub Actions to keep your Azure resources configured the way you expect.

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Finding Last Access Dates for SQL Server

Published 2024-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler checks the calendar:

Your boss walks up to you one morning and says, “Hey, I wanna list of all of our databases and when they were last accessed”.

If you’ve got some sort of auditing switched on or a trace or xevent catching this sort of info you might be ok, but I’m betting you don’t have any of that. That’s cool, it’s not something that I tend to monitor as standard either.

But if you’re not monitoring it, is there any way that you can get at that info?

Read on for one way to estimate it. Though I believe automated jobs would skew that result if the underlying question is, “When did a human last view that database?”

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Finding Duplicate Statistics in SQL Server

Published 2024-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Manuel Jurado Diaz searches for clones:

Some time ago, we encountered a support case where a customer experienced significant delays in updating auto-created and user-created statistics. I would like to share the insights gained from this experience, including the underlying causes of the issue and the potential solutions we identified and implemented to address the problem effectively.

Read on for a demo to set up the scenario and the cause of the problem, as well as how to fix it.

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Parallel Vector Index Rebuild in Postgres

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq takes a look at parallel index building in pgvector:

Parallel Index Build refers to the capability to build indexes using parallel processing. In simpler terms, it means that multiple workers or threads can be utilized simultaneously to create an index, which can significantly speed up the index creation process.

When performing an index build operation, PostgreSQL can divide the work among multiple parallel workers, each responsible for building a portion of the index.

Read on to learn more about this bit of functionality in pgvector 0.6 and the performance gains you can get from it.

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