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Category: Administration

Writing Extended Events to InfluxDB

Published 2022-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori’s speaking my language:

The TIG software stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) is a very powerful combination of software tools that can help you collect, store and analyze data that has a time attribute. In particular, InfluxDB is a time series database, built with sharding, partitioning and retention policies in mind. It is absolutely fantastic for storing telemetry data, like performance counters from SQL Server or other software products.

In order to store data in InfluxDB, you can use Telegraf, a data collection agent that takes care of extracting telemetry data from the object to observe and upload it to the InfluxDB database. Telegraf is built with the concept of plugins: each object to observe has its own plugin and it’s not surprising at all to find a specialized plugin for SQL Server.

Click through for more details and how to set it up.

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Building a SQL Server Inventory via Powershell

Published 2022-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Lee Markum wants to figure out where all the servers are:

You’re a data professional and you’ve been given the keys to a new SQL Server environment. You know you need to build a SQL Server inventory so you know what is in your environment, but how do you get that information?

One of the things I have talked about in other posts is how to create a SQL Server inventory. I’ve discussed using the MAP Toolkit and building your own inventory database using T-SQL. Today, we’ll see another way to generate a list of SQL Servers in your environment.

Click through for that method. In the past, I’ve used nmap (with permission, of course) to figure out all the SQL Server instances in my environment. Fun times.

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Running a SQL Assessment from Powershell

Published 2022-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

David Alcock performs a bit of assessment:

My last post covered the SQL Assessment extension in Azure Data Studio and in this article I’m going to look at running the SQL Assessment API using PowerShell instead. Whilst in ADS we can export assessment results to HTML or into SQL via a script the PowerShell option is a bit more flexible, we can export straight to a SQL table and run the assessment across multiple instances.

I’ll follow the PowerShell instructions from the SQL Assessment API web page; this is the code that will run the assessment on my localhost instance and it will also write the results to a table (Assessment.Results) in the SQLAssessmentDemo database, the -Force parameter will create the objects if they don’t already exist:

Read on for that code as well as a few tweaks you can make to make your life easier.

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Capturing a Call Stack without a Dump

Published 2022-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Dorr shows off Arvind’s SQL Call Stack Resolver:

Some outputs, such as the XEvent call stack action output the raw stack frame information and require a rebase to loaded module information in order to symbolize.   The security feature for random address virtualization loads images at different addresses each time the image is loaded.   This requires the module base address and the raw address in order to calculate the relative virtual address for symbolization.

Click through for more information.

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Zero Records but Lots of Space Used

Published 2022-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci solves a riddle:

Anyhow, it’s worthwhile to occasionally review the tables in a database to see which ones are growing every day, using the most space.

But what if during a review you see the largest table looks like this?

That’s around 24 GB of sweet drive space allocated for 0 records. But…how?

Let me show you how.

Click through to see how. My initial thought was LOB craziness but Jeff’s example doesn’t even need that.

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Choosing a Cost Threshold for Parallelism

Published 2022-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Andrea Allred doesn’t want to do things by the numbers:

Cost Threshold for Parallelism (CTfP) is one of my favorite server level settings in SQL Server. I remember the first time I heard this setting mentioned by Grant Fritchey. I quickly hopped on my servers and found them all set at the default (5) and adjusted them to 50 for the non SSRS servers and 30 for the SSRS ones. That was many years ago, but I had kept those numbers in my head because I didn’t know a better way.

Read on for a better way.

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Deleting an RDS Instance

Published 2022-03-01 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan takes out the trash:

We’ve created an AWS RDS instance and logged into it successfully. One thing to remember when creating test instances is when to them when you’re finished. While a lot of test instances I’ve created have been free tier, it’s still good to clean up rather than leave instances lingering. Today, let’s clean up a test instance.

Click through for the step-by-step on how to do this.

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Not Optimizing for Ad Hoc Workloads

Published 2022-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling continues a thread:

A few weeks back, my friend Randolph (B|T) and I collaborated a bit on a blog post about Optimize For Ad Hoc Workloads.

Now that I’m a Microsoft Approved Blogger™️ and you all have to take me Very Seriously™️, I’d like to make a few of the points here in my own words, though I highly suggest reading Randolph’s post because it’s much better.

Randolph writes for a living. I’m just a consultant with some free time.

Click through for Erik’s thoughts. Before reading Randolph and Erik’s posts, my figuring on it was that it didn’t hurt and could help, so “on” was a good default. These posts lay out a good reason why the former isn’t true and the latter is less likely than it seems.

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Restarting SQL Server during TDE Encryption

Published 2022-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins takes a risk:

I am planning on TDE encrypting a bunch of  large SQL Server databases. Due to potential IO contention issues during the work day , the plan is to encrypt these databases during the out of hrs period. If the encryption is triggered , but there is a SQL Server service restart during the encryption process , will  the encryption process be impacted when the SQL Server service restarts?

Click through to see what happens.

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Methods to Export Azure SQL Database

Published 2022-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

Abhishek Shaha and Ahmed Mahmoud enumerate techniques to export an Azure SQL Database:

Export Azure SQL Database is a common request for Azure SQL DB customers, in this article we are going to list down some advanced scenarios, on how this can be achievable through various tools not limited to Azure Portal, Azure CLI and PowerShell. In addition, this article will provide alternative methods when it comes to private endpoints and deny public access.

Click through for several options.

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