A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Camila Henrique summarizes the most recent T-SQL Tuesday:
I had a lot of fun reading your different takes on it! Here are the posts of everyone who contributed (and dutifully linked it back to me).
Click through for the list of entries.
Comments closedWhen doing inserts, updates or delete statements using T-SQL always, and I mean always, run them inside a transaction.
You can do this in different ways in SQL Server. One of the most popular ways is to start an explicit transaction by using the begin transaction command. From there you can either commit the transaction if it is good or issue a rollback command to undo the transaction.
Read on for the why. This is excellent advice.
Comments closedChad Callihan has some advice:
A quick T-SQL/SSMS trick that I know and love is the ability to add text to multiple lines at a time. I tend use macros in Notepad++ to accomplish these types of repetitive actions but this type of work can be completed in SSMS.
Annoyingly, this doesn’t work quite the same way in VS Code or Azure Data Studio. Alt + Down moves a line down one, Alt + Shift + Down copies the current line. To replicate this behavior in VS Code / Azure Data Studio, hold down Alt + Shift and use the mouse to select the lines you want.
Comments closedI was the host this month for T-SQL Tuesday #147 and here is a look at the people who blogged (that I know about). If I’ve missed anyone, let me know.
Click through for a summary.
Comments closedKenneth Fisher pulls out the company directory:
This month the topic we are blogging about is Upgrade Strategies. Or, how do we look at SQL Server upgrades. In my case I want to talk about the absolute hardest part of any upgrade at my company.
I should point out that I work for a large company with a lot of moving parts. Over the course of my tenure here I’ve helped to support hundreds to thousands of SQL Server instances. And at least for us, the technical part of an upgrade isn’t too bad. Where we almost always run into problems is Who do we contact?
Read on for Kenneth’s thoughts on the topic.
Comments closedT-SQL Tuesday this month is all about upgrades, so here are a few more thoughts on the topic. Let’s start with Reitse Eskens:
Things change when you’re working with a lot of data or when you’re trying to use SQL Server to the max. At some point you’ll see new features that will support your workload or add security for your data. Here are the steps I’d take to evaluate new versions.
Todd Kleinhans tells a horror story with a happy ending:
I had just been laid off for the first time in my life from a dot com. I was a classic ASP web developer, a junior development DBA, and I knew Access and FileMaker Pro. Interviewed and got hired on as a contractor to help with Access and ASP.
Before me, a local consulting company was retained to help them with the migration from Access to SQL Server. It was a disaster.
Rob Farley thinks about ways to make the upgrade process smoother:
Comments closedI don’t envy application vendors who don’t have a strong DevOps story. They need to get it in place so that they can scale, but it doesn’t happen overnight. The road to good deployment practice is long and is threatened by all kinds of things. Code coverage is rarely complete, and problems seem to find those places that don’t have good testing in place yet (typically because problems are avoided in the areas that do have good testing). All this is so much easier when a project is starting from scratch, and not the culmination of a decade or more of development needing to be compatible with the last four versions of SQL Server and Windows.
Alex Stuart tends to end up on the late adopter side of things:
My experience of SQL upgrades is that they tend to be largely dictated by neccessity, either of the ‘the Security team is getting really twitchy about these old servers’ or ‘crap, it’s license renewal time and the vendor doesn’t support x’ variety. I’ve never performed one that wasn’t under some sort of pressure. How do we get here?
Click through for the downsides of really slow adoption. The biggest problem is that you’re trading current convenience for future pain when slow-playing adoption, as Alex mentions.
Comments closedDeepthi Goguri discusses upgrading:
When I started my first job as a DBA seven years ago, my project was to migrate several SQL Servers and all the servers were in SQL Server 2000. In my first SQL class at my school, I started my learning with SQL Server 2012. It was a shock to me to work on SQL 2000 databases at the time (as I am not familiar with the SQL Server 2000 yet), especially as it was my first job as a DBA.
My first project was to migrate approximately two hundred and fifty SQL 2000 SQL Servers to SQL Server 2012/2016. It took us a couple of years to successfully migrate all these Servers.
Deepthi mentions fear as a demotivating factor. In fairness, fear is a valid response to upgrades for two separate reasons: first, because the changes they release might break your existing code (something very common in the data science world); and second, because new code has new bugs that you haven’t discovered or worked around yet.
Comments closedFirst of all, I want to thank everyone who took some time to participate in this month’s T-SQL Tuesday: Upending Preconceived Notions. There’s a fantastic line-up of contributions! I was tickled that many of the topics chosen were things I once held one viewpoint on, later learned more, and evolved that viewpoint.
Click through for the list and Andy’s thoughts on each.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand has learned a thing or two about filtered indexes:
Confession time. For filtered indexes, I have long held the following impressions:
1. That the definition of the filter had to exactly match the predicate in the query.
2. That
col IN (1, 2)was not supported in a filter definition, since it’s the same ascol = 1 OR col = 2, which is definitely not supported.
If I were to take a wild guess, I’d think impression 1 was probably influenced by the extreme limitations filtered indexes have with parameterized queries. Anyhow, read the whole thing and learn why both of these are wrong.
Comments closed