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Category: Administration

Four DBA ToDos in a New Role

Lee Markum has a starting point for DBAs in a new role:

You’ve just been hired into a DBA role at a new company, or you’ve been given the DBA keys at your current company. Maybe you’re a SysAdmin and your boss has informed you that you are now supposed to manage the SQL Servers as well as everything else on your plate. In any of these situations, you may have some confidence in your skills, but especially in the case of being a new hire, you have absolutely no true idea of what you’re walking into.

In these scenarios, where do you start? Start with these four areas.

Click through for the four areas. I completely agree with Lee on these for DBAs, including the order.

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Scaling an Azure SQL Managed Instance

Arun Sirpal wants more power:

No doubt there will be times where you need to scale up the actual instance in terms of vCores but also you may want to move across tiers (for example General Purpose to Business Critical). If you remember a few blog posts ago I said it was really important to plan for these activities during the build phase, more specifically get the subnet range right. If you done that then you will be fine.

Click through for the process, though do note the amount of time it takes. One of the early ideals of cloud processing would be that you could seamlessly scale up and down with no effects on the end user. In some services (especially things like function apps, web apps, and VMs in a Kubernetes pod), you get that experience. When it comes to almost anything data-related, though, immediate scaling is a hard no, to the point where I’d assume you can’t afford the downtime to do it until proven otherwise.

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Considerations when Upgrading to SQL Server 2019

Tom Collins has a checklist of things to consider before upgrading to SQL Server 2019:

Application Lifecycle – Each SQL Server version gets 10 years support. 5 years in mainstream support & 5 years in extended support 

                                    Mainstream support includes functional, performance, scalability and security updates.
                                    Extended support includes only security updates.

Analyse these support levels in the context of your organisations requirements . If the organization has a large footprint with a large multi-year upgrade cycle – than that will have different considerations to smaller scale

Read on for the full list.

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Things You Might Not Need in SQL Server

Erik Darling has two posts of a similar theme. First up is that you might not need to offload reads:

Duplicating data for reporting, outside of moving it to a data warehouse where there’s some transformations involved, can be an expensive and perilous task.

Your options come down to a native solution like AGs, Replication, or Log Shipping. You can brew something up yourself that relies on native stuff too, like Change Data Capture, Change Tracking, Temporal Tables, or triggers.

Erik’s suggestion here is that appropriate query tuning (and I’ll add proper database design!) does more for you than scaling out.

Then, Erik takes it one step further and recommends against certain features in SQL Server:

Consulting gives you a lot of opportunities to talk to a lot of people and deal with interesting issues.

Recently it occurred to me that a lot of people seem to confer magic button status to a lot of things that always seem to be If-I-Could-Only-Do-This features that would solve all their problems, and similarly a Thing-That-Solved-One-Problem-Once turned into something that got used everywhere.

I do agree with Erik on partitioning (which makes administration easier but usually only helps with read queries on columnstore indexes with huge numbers of rows), In-Memory OLTP (which could have been an incredible feature if it worked as I’d hoped), dirty reads, and over-use of recompilation. For sufficiently busy environments, I disagree with Erik’s take on fill factor, having been convinced by Jeff Moden that there’s a lot of value in well-thought-out fill factor settings, but to make the most of it requires more knowledge of the data than DBAs typically take the time to learn.

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Organizing a Power BI Workspace: The Checklist

Melissa Coates has a plan:

How to organize workspaces in Power BI is one of those topics that comes up a lot. On one hand, it’s really easy to quickly create a workspace and keep moving. At the same time, it’s also really useful to have a strategy for how you scope your workspaces so they don’t get out of hand over time.

In this post & video we’re going to cover 4 sets of criteria to consider when planning for workspaces in the Power BI Service.

Click through for the video, as well as a post with the details.

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Generating Markdown from SQL Server Metadata

Thomas Williams has built a documentation engine:

Sometimes there’s a need to create database documentation – an old fashioned list of tables, columns, views etc. – as part of delivering a project, or for analysts, project managers and end users.

In these situations I tend to automate. SQL Server is very “meta” in that it contains tables and records that describe, well, other tables and records. Coupled with the MS_Description extended property, it’s a powerful way to keep up-to-date documentation in close proximity to the code itself.

The script below will generate Markdown for database tables, views, stored procedures and functions. Column names and data types are listed for tables. View definitions are output. For stored procedures and functions, only the MS_Description extended property will be output.

Click through for a big disclaimer and a bigger script.

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Scheduling Tasks in SQL Server Express Edition

Steve Stedman & co don’t need your SQL Agents:

One of the feature differences between SQL Server Express Edition and the other paid versions is the ability to schedule jobs or tasks using the SQL Server Agent.

Even if you are running SQL Server Express Edition, there is a need to run scheduled jobs.

I’ve used this option and yes, it does work. But it’s definitely a few steps down from using SQL Agent jobs. Still, if that’s not available to you, this is a viable fallback option.

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