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Category: Configuration

pg_stat_statements and Public Sentiment

Published 2023-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Scherbaum polls the audience:

For anyone who doesn’t know, I’m running a weekly interview series with people from the PostgreSQL community. It’s called “PostgreSQL Person of the Week“. One of the questions in the default set I give everyone is:

What is your favorite PostgreSQL extension?

And guess what the answer is: by far everyone’s favorite is pg_stat_statements!

Read on to learn a bit more about what the extension does, why people like it, and what other extensions interviewees prefer.

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Tracking Configuration-Based Performance Differences in Postgres

Published 2023-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Lambert shows off a Postgres extension:

This is my entry for PgSQL Phriday #008. It’s Saturday, so I guess this is a day late! This month’s topic, chosen by Michael from pgMustard, is on the excellent pg_stat_statements extension. When I saw Michael was the host this month I knew he’d pick a topic I would want to contribute on! Michael’s post for his own topic provides helpful queries and good reminders about changes to columns between Postgres version 12 and 13.

In this post I show one way I like using pg_stat_statements: tracking the impact of configuration changes to a specific workload. I used a contrived change to configuration to quickly make an obvious impact.

Read on for the example.

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Identify SQL Server Configuration Drift

Published 2021-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley won’t let the cattle become pets:

As you sit and wonder about when the next Star Wars movie is going to come out, do you ever get the thought of “I wonder if all my SQL Servers are configured the same?”

Occasionally, I get a thought like that run through my mind. Or I might see something on Twitter or Blog post about something, and it sparks the question.  Not about Star Wars, but my SQL Server environment.

Today something triggered me to confirm that all of my SQL Servers had the default backup compression setting set to enabled.

Garry mentions dbachecks at the end, and it’s a really good way of performing a fairly large number of such checks easily.

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SQL Server Configuration Settings Requiring Restarts

Published 2021-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West enumerates configuration settings which do (or do not) require a restart of the SQL Server database engine:

SQL Server is a complex beast, with many configuration options that can range from recommended to completely avoided.

Since the release of SQL Server 2016, several options that were recommended post-install have been rolled into the default installation options and no longer need to be done, and similar changes were made with SQL Server 2017. Even so, there are configuration changes we data professionals need to make after installation, during maintenance windows, and sometimes even during operating hours, so here’s a handy list of changes that do and don’t require a restart of your operating system or SQL Server instance.

As Randolph mentions, this set is not conclusive. For example, enabling PolyBase requires a restart of the database engine. I believe enabling ML Services technically does not, though I do out of caution because the back of my mind remembers something weird about the service’s behavior if you don’t restart the database engine, but p > 0 my brain made up the whole thing.

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Working with SQL Server Configuration Files

Published 2020-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick takes us through an underrated part of the SQL Server installer:

The ability to use a parameter file (configurationfile.ini), for automating the installation of SQL Server, has been around for many years. However, each release of SQL Server has had different parameters that could be included in the file. Here are some directions on how to find or create a parameter file, along with the parameter values that are supported by each version of SQL Server.

I appreciate the fact that every installation of SQL Server generates one of these and even points it out to you as you go through the installer wizard. And Jamie has gone a step further by giving us an Excel spreadsheet with all of the available settings and their defaults.

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Configuring Kubernetes Pod Eviction Time

Published 2020-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski is a Kubernetes slumlord:

The default time that it takes from a node being reported as not-ready to the pods being moved is 5 minutes.

This really isn’t a problem if you have multiple pods running under a single deployment. The pods on the healthy nodes will handle any requests made whilst the pod(s) on the downed node are waiting to be moved.

But what happens when you only have one pod in a deployment? Say, when you’re running SQL Server in Kubernetes? Five minutes really isn’t an acceptable time for your SQL instance to be offline.

Click through to see how to handle this scenario.

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Checking Spark Config on Windows

Published 2019-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott has a Powershell script to tell you if your Spark configuration on Windows is incorrect:

There are some pretty common mistakes people make (myself included!), most common I have seen recently have been having a semi-colon in JAVA_HOME/SPARK_HOME/HADOOP_HOME or having HADOOP_HOME not point to a directory with a bin folder which contains winutils.

To help, I have written a small powershell script that a) validates that the setup is correct and then b) runs one of the spark examples to prove that everything is setup correctly.

Click through for the script.

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Configuring dbatools

Published 2019-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Claudio Silva shares some tips on configuring dbatools:

Set a new configuration value
To update a value you need to use the Set-DbatoolsConfig command. Unfortunately, you will not find documentation for this command on our docs page. This is a known issue and it happens because that command is a cmdlet so the help is in the dbatools library itself.

For this particular case, you can and should rely on the Get-Help command.

Get-Help -Name Set-DbatoolsConfig -Full

Claudio has a half-dozen or so settings and there are more available to you.

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Desired State Configuration’s Local Configuration Manager

Published 2019-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret continues a series on Desired State Configuration in Powershell:

Once we have crafted the perfect configuration and shipped it out to our target nodes, it’s time for the magic to happen. The MOF file that we created by executing our configuration is translated and enacted by the Local Configuration Manager (LCM) on each target node. The LCM is the engine of DSC and plays a vital role in managing our target nodes.
The LCM on each target node has many settings that can be configured using a meta configuration. This document is written very similarly to our regular DSC configurations and then pushed out to the target node.

I’m going to cover a few of the important LCM settings for use in push mode. This is where the LCM passively waits for a MOF file to arrive. The other option is pull mode- this is a little more complicated to set up and in this scenario the LCM is set to actively check in with a pull server for new configurations.

Click through to see some of those important settings.

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