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Category: Administration

Creating a Trust between On-Prem AD and AWS Directory Service

Published 2022-03-16 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins makes a connection:

Most SQL Servers use a large portion of the authentication as Windows Authentication – utilising Kerberos and NTLM protocols via Active Directory. So when it comes to considering moving on-prem SQL Server resources to Cloud Providers – Active Directory is a foundational question.    There are other methods than Microsoft Directory – which I’ll discuss in future posts.

Utilising AWS RDS SQL Server with Windows Authentication methods is only possible using the AWS Directory Service.  i.e The AWS RDS SQL Server is created and added as a resource to the AWS Directory Service . If on-prem users require access to the AWS RDS SQL Server via Kerberos , a forest trust is required between the AWS Directory Service and the on-prem AD. 

For this post – the focus is on an existing on-premises SQL Server inventory using Microsoft Active Directory Services.

Read on to see what you’d need to do to implement this.

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Dropping Offline Databases in SQL Server

Published 2022-03-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan has a couple notes about dropping offline databases:

“Oops” is not a word you want to utter often as a database administrator. Sure, accidents happen (who hasn’t missed that WHERE clause when deleting data) but there are steps you can take to minimize problems that will ruin your day, week, etc. Let’s look at a few ways to delete databases that supposedly are no longer needed.

“I’m feeling lucky” isn’t something most DBAs choose.

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Finding Zero-Record Tables Taking Space in SQL Server

Published 2022-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci has a follow-up for us:

This is a follow up post to the previous one about tables with no records using data space, with the idea coming from twitter of all places. Sometimes on twitter the conversations kill, but after reading that post my friend Chris Wood suggested writing something to FIND those tables.

Which is a solid idea, so let’s get to it. No time to wait too long.

Click through for the process.

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SQLBits Keynote Notes

Published 2022-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar shares some thoughts from the first day’s keynote from SQLBits:

Pedro Lopes took the stage to talk about parameter-sensitive plan optimization, aka PSP Optimization. He demoed it with SQL Server 2022 CTP 1.3. I’ve written about this feature before, and there wasn’t anything new here in the demos. My opinion on this feature remains the same: I think it sounds like a phenomenal down payment. It won’t fix parameter sniffing, but I don’t think it’s going to backfire.

Read on for Brent’s thoughts around what Microsoft is doing for SQL Server 2022.

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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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