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Category: CLR

An Overview of CLR

Published 2023-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan gives us the primer:

I was setting up a dev environment for a new application recently. All seemed to be well until I went to actually run the application. I was getting a vague error in the application and still didn’t know the exact cause. I fired up an XEvents session to find the query causing the issue and found a query failing with the following error:

Msg 6263, Level 16, State 1, Procedure dbo.MyProc, Line 60 [Batch Start Line 14]
Execution of user code in the .NET Framework is disabled. Enable “clr enabled” configuration option.

Incidentally, my single biggest gripe around CLR integration in SQL Server (and something I complain about almost every time someone brings up the feature) is that they really messed up in picking names. CLR has Safe and Unsafe modes.

What the terms mean:

  • Safe = managed mode. Your .NET language of choice (at the time, VB.Net or C#) handles pointers for you, so you can’t dereference a null pointer. Well, you still can but will instead get an “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” exception rather than some potentially unexpected behavior
  • Unsafe = developers control pointers. There were some things, especially in 2005, that made sense to create in Unsafe mode because it was considerably faster

What far too many DBAs interpreted it as: “I don’t want unsafe code running in my systems! Ban CLR!”

This fundamental misunderstanding of terms killed a smart integration and capability for extremely fast functions—for example, the fastest way to split a string in T-SQL is via CLR, and there’s a lot of impressive functionality you can get at near-native speeds (i.e., if the SQL Server team wrote the code as a function instead of you, allowing them to optimize the database engine for that function) with a few lines of code. But the leads at most places saw the word “Unsafe” and nope’d out.

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String Parsing with SQLCLR

Published 2020-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Josh Darnell would like you to give CLR a try:

The basic problem is this: given a string of arbitrary characters, return a new string containing only numbers. If there are no numbers, return NULL.

One use case for a function like this would be removing special characters from a phone number, although that’s not the specific goal of this function.

Doing string manipulation directly in SQL Server using T-SQL is somewhat infamously slow. This is stated very nicely in Aaron Bertrand’s (b | t) blog post Performance Surprises and Assumptions : STRING_SPLIT() (note he’s talking about splitting strings, the emphasis is mine to illustrate the broader point):

Throughout, my conclusion has been: STOP DOING THIS IN T-SQL. Use CLR or, better yet, pass structured parameters like DataTables from your application to table-valued parameters (TVPs) in your procedures, avoiding all the string construction and deconstruction altogether – which is really the part of the solution that causes performance problems.

For the life of me, I really don’t get why CLR is supposed to be so scary for DBAs. The best answer I have is that they matched the .NET term “unsafe” (which means unmanaged code) and DBAs, without a .NET background, interpreted that the wrong way.

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CLR Assembly Failure After Availability Group Failover

Published 2019-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal walks us through a permissions issue after an Availability Group failover:

Jonathan was working with a client recently who experienced a CLR assembly failure after an AG failover and needed to figure out why. They’d been testing their AG disaster recovery strategy and ran into an unexpected problem with their application which relies heavily on SQLCLR and an UNSAFE assembly that calls a web service from inside SQL Server.  When they failed over their AG to their DR server, the CLR assembly failed with the following error:

An error occurred in the Microsoft .NET Framework while trying to load assembly id 65546. The server may be running out of resources, or the assembly may not be trusted with PERMISSION_SET = EXTERNAL_ACCESS or UNSAFE. Run the query again, or check documentation to see how to solve the assembly trust issues. For more information about this error: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly ‘sqlclr_assemblyname, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=fa39443c11b12591’ or one of its dependencies. Exception from HRESULT: 0x80FC80F1

Read on to see the root cause and what you can do to correct it.

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Iterative Solutions To The Closest Match Problem

Published 2019-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Itzik Ben-Gan has a follow-up article looking at row-by-row solutions to the closest match problem:

Last month, I covered a puzzle involving matching each row from one table with the closest match from another table. I got this puzzle from Karen Ly, a Jr. Fixed Income Analyst at RBC. I covered two main relational solutions that combined the APPLY operator with TOP-based subqueries. Solution 1 always had quadratic scaling. Solution 2 did quite well when provided with good supporting indexes, but without those indexes also had quadric scaling. In this article I cover iterative solutions, which despite being generally frowned upon by SQL pros, do provide much better scaling in our case even without optimal indexing.

Itzik has three separate solutions here, including one using the CLR.

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Permission Set In A Post-SQL 2017 CLR World

Published 2018-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky investigates what the PERMISSION_SET property does as of SQL Server 2017:

And farther down on that same page, there is a note stating:

 Important
The PERMISSION_SET option is affected by the clr strict security option, described in the opening warning. When clr strict security is enabled, all assemblies are treated as UNSAFE.

The last sentence in each of those quoted statements certainly does seem to be saying that when “CLR strict security” is enabled, then UNSAFE is effectively the only PERMISSION_SET, or stated another way: then PERMISSION_SET effectively no longer has any effect. However, as usual, things are perhaps not so simple given that the wording is not explicitly stating that. It would be rather easy to add a few words to both statements to indicate that the PERMISSION_SET property is now being ignored. Other documentation makes similar claims (for example: allow updates Server Configuration Option). So, did they fail to explicitly state this, or was this not stated because it is not what is actually happening?

Read on for Solomon’s answer.

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Sending SQL Server Notifications To Slack

Published 2018-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Alessandro Alpi shows how to integrate SQL Server notifications with Slack:

Now, how can we send notifications from SQL Server in an easier way than using custom code or a Slack incoming webhook? Is there any integration or a Slack app?  Yes. And guess what? I think you’ll like it because you don’t need to write a single line of code, and you don’t need to choose between CLR, PowerShell or any other language. It’s ironic, but the integration is called “Email”.

Speaking of CLR, I’ve had success with the SqlServerSlackAPI in the past.

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Is sp_execute_external_script Replacing CLR?

Published 2018-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky makes me invoke Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

With the additional (and annoying) configuration step required to get SQLCLR Assemblies to load starting in SQL Server 2017, some people have been wondering what is going on with SQLCLR. Considering that this new restriction is the only real change to SQLCLR since SQL Server 2012 (three versions ago), then with (limited) support for languages such as R (starting in SQL Server 2016) and Python (starting in SQL Server 2017) being added, it might even look like SQLCLR is being deprecated (i.e. phased-out) in favor of these new languages.

Could this be true? There is no official indication, but could it be unofficially / “effectively” deprecated? Well, let’s take a look.

As someone who likes CLR, I want both CLR and Machine Learning Services to co-exist.  This would be true even if ML Services supported F# and the lesser .NET languages.

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CLR_MANUAL_EVENT Waits

Published 2018-07-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Kehayias traces out the cause of CLR_MANUAL_EVENT waits on SQL Server:

The fact that no data has been collected for this type throughout a good cross-section of their customers really confirmed for me that this isn’t something that is commonly a problem, so I was intrigued by the fact that this specific workload was now exhibiting problems with this wait. I wasn’t sure where to go to further investigate the issue so I replied to the email saying I was sorry that I couldn’t help further because I didn’t have any idea what would be causing literally dozens of threads performing spatial queries to all of sudden start having to wait for 2-4 seconds at a time on this wait type.

A day later, I received a kind follow-up email from the person that asked the question that informed me that they had resolved the problem. Indeed, nothing in the actual application workload had changed, but there was a change to the environment that occurred. A third-party software package was installed on all of the servers in their infrastructure by their security team, and this software was collecting data at five-minute intervals and causing the .NET garbage collection processing to run incredibly aggressively and “go nuts” as they said. Armed with this information and some of my past knowledge of .NET development I decided I wanted to play around with this some and see if I could reproduce the behavior and how we could go about troubleshooting the causes further.

Read the whole thing if you use CLR.

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Using CLR To Call HTTP Endpoints From T-SQL

Published 2018-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic shows how to use cURL from within SQL Server with the CLR:

This code will add one function and one procedure in SQL Server that implements the following CURL functions:

  • CURL.XGET – function that calls API on some http endpoint using get method and fetches the response. It has two parameters:

    • @H representing the header information that should be sent to remote endpoint (null for none).
    • @url representing the endpoint where the Http request should be sent.

  • CURL.XPOST – procedure that sends text to some http endpoint using post method and prints response. It has three parameters:

    • @H representing the header information that should be sent to the remote endpoint (null for none).

    • @d representing the data that should be sent to remote endpoint in the request body.

    • @url representing the endpoint where the Http request should be sent.

Click through for the process.  I’ve never been afraid of CLR and it is a rather useful tool, but pushing for CLR is definitely like swimming upstream.

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SQLSharp 4.1 Released

Published 2018-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky announces a new release of SQL#:

  • GENERAL

    • Greatly reduced size (by approx. 310 kb) of main SQL# Assembly by moving LookUp category into its own Assembly: SQL#.LookUps. This will improve initial load times and won’t waste much memory when not using the LookUp functions.

  • Installation Script

    • Account for security changes related to SQL Server 2017 (i.e. “CLR strict security“) using a Certificate (flexible, clean) instead of the new “Trusted Assemblies” (inflexible, messy).

  • Networking

    • Added explicit support for TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 protocols

    • Increased default “Connection Limit” for URIs to 20 from the .NET default of 2. This will reduce performance bottlenecks from concurrent access to the same URI.

SQL# is also the first place where I found a decent median function for SQL Server.

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