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Category: Linux

T-SQL Tuesday 116 Roundup

Published 2019-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, on the topic of SQL Server on Linux:

I noticed a common theme in how easy it is to install SQL on Linux that tells me if you didn’t think you had time to install SQL on Linux then you probably do and should give a try in the near future.

Thanks for all that participated!

Let me put it this way: one of my employees, who had never really worked with SQL Server before, got SQL Server on Linux installed through Docker in about 15 minutes. It’s really easy to do.

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Extended Events Files on Linux

Published 2019-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall looks at an error when trying to set up an Extended Events session on Linux:

This will fail before the query really even gets out of the gate. Why? The proc xp_create_subdir cannot create the directory because it requires elevated permissions. The fix for that is easy enough – grant permissions to write to the Database directory after creating it while in sudo mode. I will get to that in just a bit. Let’s see what the errors would look like for now.

Msg 22048, Level 16, State 1, Line 15
xp_create_subdir() returned error 5, ‘Access is denied.’
Msg 25602, Level 17, State 23, Line 36
The target, “5B2DA06D-898A-43C8-9309-39BBBE93EBBD.package0.event_file”, encountered a configuration error during initialization. Object cannot be added to the event session. The operating system returned error 5: ‘Access is denied.
‘ while creating the file ‘C:\Database\XE\PREEMPTIVE_OS_PIPEOPS_0_132072025269680000.xel’

Read on for the solution.

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dbatools and Linux

Published 2019-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire takes us through dbatools support on Linux:

As a long-time Linux user and open-source advocate, I was beyond excited when PowerShell and SQL Server came to Linux.

A few of the decisions I made about dbatools were actually inspired by Linux. For instance, when dbatools was initially released, it was GNU GPL licensed, which is the same license as the Linux kernel (we’ve since re-licensed under the more permissive MIT). In addition, dbatools’ all-lower-case naming convention was also inspired by Linux, as most commands executed within Linux are in lower-case and a number of projects use the lower-case naming convention as well.

Considering how many OS-specific operations there are, the percentage of Powershell commands in dbatools which work is excellent.

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Configuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux

Published 2019-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele is too cool for Windows shells:

Microsoft has provided a native Linux experience for Windows, called the Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL. If you haven’t heard of this feature yet, here’s the short version of what this means:

– “Install” a Linux distribution of you choice into your Windows 10 environment, which
– Enables you to run common Linux command line tools, like grep and sed, which is something your Linux using friends and co-workers have been bragging about since like, forever, and
– Gives you access to other Linux applications and commands, available via your chosen distribution’s package manager, and oh before I forget
– Gives you an honest-to-goodness native SSH shell experience on your machine without the need for a third party application

Sounds cool, right? Well, it is. 

It is.

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Persistent Memory and SQL Server

Published 2019-06-07 by Kevin Feasel

Ned Otter gives us the rundown on Persistent Memory and how it can make life smoother:

SQL 2017 on Windows Server 2016 behaves the same as SQL 2016 on Windows Server 2016 – “tail of the log” is supported. However, there is no support for PMEM with SQL 2017 on supported Linux distributions (except as a traditional block store). Using PMEM with SQL 2019 on Linux supports what’s known as “enlightenment”, which allows us to place data and log files on DAX formatted volumes, thereby reducing latency considerably. SQL 2019 on Linux also support “tail of the log”.

This is one of those areas where understanding Linux versus Windows administration really pays off, at least until Windows Server supports something like enlightenment.

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PolyBase on Linux

Published 2019-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post showing how to set up PolyBase on Linux:

Now that we have SQL Server on Linux installed, we can begin to install PolyBase. There are some instructions here but because we started with the Docker image, we’ll need to do a little bit of prep work. Let’s get our shell on.

First, run docker ps to figure out your container ID. Mine is 818623137e9f. From there, run the following command, replacing the container ID with a reasonable facsimile of yours.

I actually fired up my copy of SimCity 2000 to take a screenshot for this post. The things I do for my audience.

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Bash Script Introductions

Published 2019-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman continues a series on Bash scripting:

For Part II, we’ll start with the BASH script “introduction”.

The introduction in a BASH script should begin the same in all scripts.
1. Set the shell to be used for the script
2. Set the response to failure on any steps, (exit or ignore)
3. Add in a step for testing, but comment out or remove when in production

For our scripts, we’ll keep to the BASH format that is used by the template scripts, ensuring a repeatable and easy to identify introduction.

Click through to see what that entails.

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Azure Cloud Shell

Published 2019-04-30 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Broadbent gives us an introduction to Azure Cloud Shell:

There are two ways to access Azure Cloud Shell, the first being directly through the Azure Portal itself. Once authenticated, look to the top right of the Portal and you should see a grouping of icons and in particular, one that looks very much like a DOS prompt (have no fear, DOS is nowhere to be seen).

The second method to access Azure Cloud Shell is by jumping directly to it via shell.azure.com which will require you to authenticate to your subscription before launching. There is an ever so slight difference between each method. Accessing the Shell via the Azure Portal will not require you to specify your Azure directory context (assuming you have several) since your Portal will have already defaulted to one, whereas with the direct URL method that obviously doesn’t happen.

Read the whole thing.

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Azure SQL Linux VM Configuration with dbatools

Published 2019-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell walks us through configuring SQL Server on an Azure VM running Linux, installing Powershell, and using dbatools:

I had set the Network security rules to accept connections only from my static IP using variables in the Build Pipeline. I use MobaXterm as my SSH client. Its a free download. I click on sessions

There wasn’t much I could excerpt here, but this is a heavily screenshot-driven tutorial.

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Scripting with Variables in Bash

Published 2019-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman shows how easy it can be to write Bash scripts with variables:

Let’s start with a use case of deploying a Azure database. When a customer is making the decision to build it out, there are specific information needed to deploy and this will continue to change as the Azure catalog is updated with new offerings. For our example, we’ll stick to a very small snippet of code, as the values we dynamically create will be reused throughout the script. This example will skip past the actual server creation, etc. and just focus on the user database creation. The Server, zone and subscription are all set in the default steps earlier on so as not to have to repeat it throughout each resource deployment step.

There’s a lot to Bash and its programming guide is a lot of sheets of paper (ask me how I know), but this is one of those places where you can get a nice benefit easily.

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