A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your Kevin Wilkie is?:
In our last few posts, we’ve looked at how to:
Today, we’re diving into a different, but equally powerful question:
When are my Snowflake warehouses actually running?
Click through for the query and an example of it in action.
Leave a CommentCopy job has been a go-to tool for simplified data ingestion in Microsoft Fabric, offering a seamless data movement experience from any source to any destination. Whether you need batch or incremental copying, it provides the flexibility to meet diverse data needs while maintaining a simple and intuitive workflow.
We continuously refine Copy job based on customer feedback, enhancing both functionality and user experience. In this update, we’re introducing several key improvements designed to streamline your workflow and boost efficiency.
Click through to see what’s new.
Leave a CommentMiquella de Boer has an announcement:
Shortcut transformations is a new capability in Microsoft Fabric that simplifies the process of converting raw files, starting with .CSV files, into Delta tables. This feature eliminates the need for traditional ETL pipelines, enabling users to transform data directly on top of files with minimal setup.
Click through to see how it all works.
Leave a CommentJeff Horner doesn’t need permanence:
One of the simplest yet most impactful performance optimizations for SQL Server is relocating the tempdb system database to a fast, dedicated disk—especially if that disk is temporary or ephemeral. This is a common practice in cloud environments and high-performance database systems where tempdb churn is high and doesn’t require persistence across reboots.
Click through for more information on how this can work well for you, as well as how to do it safely and things to keep in mind. One thing I would add is, I vaguely recall that on Azure at least, the temporary D: drive might not be mapped at startup, and it may take a few seconds after startup for the mapping to occur. Thus, it may be a good idea to have the SQL Server service start on a delay to ensure that you don’t run into an issue due to task ordering on startup.
Leave a CommentKevin Wilkie doesn’t want to spend that extra money:
Now that we’ve loaded our Costs Dashboard with all sorts of goodness, let’s take it a step further and make it even more useful. The goal: track unused warehouses to help manage spend and reduce clutter.
Read on to see how you can do this.
Leave a CommentMatt Collins shares a deployment guide:
For those who have been following along with our product CF.Cumulus, we have been gearing up for some exciting developments and want to give more power and independence to users. As such, we’re putting together some comprehensive “How-to” guides to simplify the deployment process for Community Edition users.
This deployment guide walks you through setting up CF.Cumulus with the Azure Resources depicted below.
Click through for the guide.
Leave a CommentKevin Hill has a reminder for us:
Here’s a common theme I hear from small IT teams:
“Our SQL Server is in the cloud now. We don’t need a DBA.”
Not quite.
When you’re running SQL Server on cloud virtual machines like Azure SQL VM or AWS EC2, you’re still responsible for a lot of the same challenges you faced on-prem. The difference? Now you’re paying cloud rates for the same headaches. But you don’t have to deal with hardware and some of the other infrastructure hassles.
Read on to see what that entails in practice. Though I’m pretty sure my target audience generally understands this and it’s people two or three levels up who should give Kevin’s post a read.
Leave a CommentEd Elliott troubleshoots an issue:
I recently encountered an interesting issue with ADF where the publish feature suddenly attempted to republish every single object, claiming they were new, despite having incrementally published changed objects for some time.
We were using the publish feature where you work on a branch until you are happy, then you raise a PR to main, merge to main, and then switch back to ADF and click publish to push the changes to the
adf_publishbranch.
Click through for the answer. I also love how Ed’s tl;dr is “too bad, read it anyhow.”
Leave a CommentRayis Imayev does a bit of logging:
Azure Data Factory is no exception when it comes to logging options. All your debug or triggered pipeline executions—their parameters passed during execution, statuses, timings, durations, and more, can be monitored natively in Azure Data Studio. Once you immerse yourself in the realm of previously executed pipelines and start seeing all activities, passed input values, processed output results, and variables being transformed into something else that can only be understood by examining internal expressions and many other details, you begin to feel like an investigator meticulously analyzing everything.
Read on to see what kinds of logging options are available and how you can work with them.
Leave a CommentEd Lima combines expensive with expensive:
Integrating Azure API Management (APIM) with Microsoft Fabric’s API for GraphQL can significantly enhance your API’s capabilities by providing robust scalability and security features such as identity management, rate limiting, and caching. This post will guide you through the process of setting up and configuring these features.
API Management is a really neat service, though it’s rather costly. That’s my biggest complaint about it, though it is a doozy.
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