A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chad Callihan doesn’t have time for the UI:
If you need to make changes to multiple servers, you may want to avoid the GUI approach and all of the clicks that come with it. In that case, msdb contains a stored procedure called sysmail_update_account_sp that might be a more efficient approach. Let’s take a quick look at sysmail_update_account_sp and what it can do for you.
Read on to see how the procedure works and what you can do.
Comments closedGreg Dodd has an Extended Events session for that:
Do you ever have a stored procedure that you know is performing badly and needs tuning, but you’re struggling to capture when it is run or what parameters were passed in?
I had this problem recently, I knew that a particular stored procedure was running slowly for some parameters, but figuring out what the bad combination was proved to be very difficult. What if, instead of trying to guess what the parameters were, I just captured all of the time that the stored proc ran, along with the run time?
This isn’t something you’d want to run for everything at all times, I’m sure, but this can be quite important when you’re fighting one poorly-performing stored procedure.
Comments closedJoe Obbish resolves a specific type of plan cache issue involving shared temp tables:
The problem can be observed with a simple repro script. The child stored procedure performs a series of updates on a temp table. The parent procedure creates the temp table, calls the child stored procedure, and returns data from the temp table.
Click through to see an example of the issue, as well as one technique to mitigate the problem.
Comments closedJay Robinson defends the highly defensible:
The point I’m trying to make is that the database code is treated as part of the solution. It is in the repos just like the C# code. It is deployed just like the C# code. I even include unit testing, just like the C# code.
I also keep all T-SQL in the database. There is no T-SQL code inside the C# code. Stored procedures are used for all functionality, even basic CRUD functions. In fact, probably 80–90% of the stored procedures in my systems are essentially CRUD functions. The only operation that doesn’t go through stored procedures is bulk insertion, and I use SqlBulkCopy for that.
Jay makes what I often consider the most important point from the standpoint of developers: that stored procedures act as an interface.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi calls a stored procedure:
From time to time, Excel users require to get the data from a SQL Server stored procedure. The stored procedures usually accept some input parameters and return the results. But how can we dynamically pass values to the stored procedures from cells in Excel to SQL Server?
Read on for two approaches to the problem. Like Soheil, I think the second approach is much smoother, in part because it isn’t 30-something steps long.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher shares an opinion:
I was asked a rather interesting question during an interview recently. It went something like this:
Your resume says you’ve implemented security standards. What do you do if a development team comes to you and says “We have to have a SQL Server Id in production (or other restricted permission) because that’s the way we tested it and we are going into production now.”?
And in general my response is “You give it to them. It’s too late to stop them at that point.”
Kenneth goes on to elaborate.
I prefer a compromise solution, which requires more than 2 environments. Dev is a sandbox. Developers don’t know what they need and generally need more space to work than the final product itself will need. A wide-open dev environment is something I don’t mind. In some organizations, a local dev environment may be sufficient for this task—that is, SQL Server (or whatever) installed on the developer’s personal machine or brought in via Docker container.
However, there must be at least one pre-production environment in which developers have prod-level rights. Ideally, it would not be the last step of integration prior to prod but instead something like a QA environment which is part of a CI/CD process.
I should also point out that module signing helps with this problem: stored procedures may contain rights that devs shouldn’t have but are necessary to the way an application functions. Access to execute those stored procedures is something the DBA team can control and put some limits around, so in Kenneth’s example, truncation could be handled via stored procedure. That procedure handles the truncation operation and opens the door to further checks, such as a list (or table) of tables which the app is allowed to truncate, logging of operations, etc.
Comments closedErik Darling continues to be busy:
I haven’t run into a bug with this thing in just about… Well, ever. This proc has been pretty solid.
As I use it though, especially in front of clients, I find myself wanting some additional data points all in one place. With this release, I’ve added a few small things.
Click through for the list of updates.
Comments closedI made some updates to sp_QuickieStore recently, which you can download here.
The main updates to the code are to:
– Add support for SQL Server 2022 views
– Add the ability to search by query hash, plan hash, and SQL handle
But wait, there’s more! Click through to see the full-ish changelog.
Comments closedErik Darling continues a quest. Part 3 involves local variables:
What never seems to get a bad name, despite numerical supremacy in producing terrible results, are local variables.
In this particular scenario, I see developers use them to try to beat “parameter sniffing” to no avail.
A chorus of “it seemed to work at the time”, “I think it made things a little better”, “it worked on my machine”, and all that will ensue.
But we know the truth.
The next part is around stored procedures:
You know and I know and everyone knows that stored procedures are wonderful things that let you tune queries in magickal ways that stupid ORMs and ad hoc queries don’t really allow for.
Sorry about your incessant need to use lesser ways to manifest queries. They just don’t stack up.
But since we’re going to go high brow together, we need to learn how to make sure we don’t do anything to tarnish the image of our beloved stored procedures.
Erik notes that stored procedures are part of the solution but there’s a bit more that we need.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher has a use for temporary stored procedures:
The other day I was asked to create a SQL Audit on several different databases. Completely unexpectedly (sarcasm warning!) the list grew, not once, not twice, but enough times that I’ve lost count, and each time I would copy and paste my code for the new databases and change the database name in each piece. Then on one notable occasion I had to change the code for each of the, at that point 10, copies of the code. Talk about a headache.
Then there was the epiphany.
Comments closed