A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Deborah Melkin continues a series on Power Apps:
As a developer, I have two things I have to do: 1. Check code into source control and 2. Make sure I can use that code to deploy to any and all environments repeatably and successfully. The question then becomes, how do you do this when the development environment is in a portal?
Read on for the answer, as well as a tricky situation you might run into along the way.
Comments closedVlad Drumea is a trusting fellow:
This post covers a few ways to fix the SSL certificate error 1416F086 returned by sqlcmd on Linux when connecting to SQL Server.
If you’re looking for ways to fix the Windows equivalent of this error when using dbatools, check out this blog post.
It’s interesting how much controversy we’re seeing around tools like sqlcmd and (especially) SQL Server Management Studio defaulting to mandatory encryption. Having signed and valid certificates is a critical part of validating that this SQL Server is actually the one you think it is, and no intermediary attacker has swapped the certificate out with a phony one that allows the attacker to spy on your interactions.
I can understand people who are just messing around with SQL Server locally to experience pain on this, but the sheer number of actual companies—including companies using Central Management Servers, which implies having multiple SQL Server instances—with garbage-tier self-signed certificates is discouragingly high.
By the way, I’m aiming none of my rant at Vlad or this post. It’s just top-of-mind and this was as good a vehicle for rant delivery as I could find.
Comments closedTeo Lachev shares some advice:
Alerting is an important monitoring task for any ETL process. Azure Data Factory can integrate with a generic Azure event framework (Azure Monitor) which makes it somewhat unintuitive for ETL monitoring. You can set up and change the alerts using the ADF Monitoring hub.
Read on for five pieces of advice, in particular, covering how to set up one of these alerts.
Comments closedAndy Brownsword forgets something at home:
Within SSIS you can make use of custom components which aren’t present out of the box. An example of some would be the Azure Feature Pack if you’re working with cloud resources.
These will let us use features not available natively. They can also provide a challenge down the line when we come to deploy changes to the project.
Here we’ll look at an example of this challenge, how to troubleshoot, and ultimately resolve the issue.
Read on for the scenario and fix.
Comments closedThom Andrews shares a bit of advice:
A problem I’ve seen raised on numerous occasions is users that are getting a non-descript error when they are doing some kind of DML/DDL operation, and they don’t know why they are getting the error, and what is causing it. That error is:
Msg 3609, Level 16, State 2, Line 1
The transaction ended in the trigger. The batch has been aborted.
Read on to learn more about good alternatives, remembering that you’re in the context of some other call when a trigger fires.
Comments closedReitse Eskens hit an interesting issue:
The issue is quite simple. A text needs to be converted into a SHA2_256 hash for some authentication reasons. The example shown here is simplified. The thing is, the outcome of the hash isn’t accepted by the authorising party and when the input is checked via an online MD5 hashing site, there’s a difference between that output and that from the SQL Script.
Read on to see what the problem is and how it can affect you.
Comments closedSteve Jones gives it the ol’ college try:
This is a common error handling technique in other languages. C# uses it, as does Java, while Python has TRY EXCEPT. There are other examples, but these are good habits to get into when you don’t know how code will behave or if there is something in your data or environment that could cause an issue.
In SQL, I think many of us get used to writing one statement in a query and forget to do error handling, or transactions. However, this can be a good habit as your code might grow and people might add more statements that should execute.
Read on for a few examples of how to use SQL Server’s TRY-CATCH functionality. It’s not perfect, but as Steve shows, there are definitely good uses for it.
Comments closedReitse Eskens pushes the envelope:
In my previous blog on Fabric and loadtesting, I ended with not really knowing how PowerBI would respond to all these rows. After creating and presenting a session on this subject, it’s time to dig into this part of Fabric as well. There were questions and I made promises. So here goes! This blog will only show the F2 experience as that’s where things went off the road. And, as I’ve shown in the previous blog, the CU count doesn’t change between SKU’s, only the amount of SKU’s available changes.
This blog isn’t meant to scold Fabric or make it look silly, I’m the one who’s silly. The goal is to show some limitations, a way you can do some load testing and help you find your way in the available metrics.
Read on to see what Reitse has gotten into.
Comments closedDeborah Melkin shares a lesson:
I’ve been working on a project where I have to do a lot of interesting data manipulation. Unfortunately, dealing with implicit conversions has been part of the norm. So naturally, I managed to run across an interesting scenario that had me stumped, thinking that I ran into a strange edge case.
The tl;dr version is that this wasn’t an edge case or some undocumented issue or a bug or anything other than the db engine doing its job. I was looking at one scenario and missed the rest of the clues. But it’s worth sharing how these things are easily missed.
Click through for the full story.
Comments closedReitse Eskens hits a weird error:
One of the transformations is to change one primary key column from integer to GUID. This is something you can do with some trickery you’ll see in the code. But what I found was that, even though the primary key is unique, the GUID’s weren’t. And then the fun starts digging into the why…
Read on for the research Reitse performed. I don’t even have a good guess for this, it’s so weird. It feels like a bug but it’s weird regardless.
Comments closed