A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kevin Chant talks about a recent issue:
Recently I have been helping others get up to speed with Microsoft Fabric. Which includes going through some Power BI topics.
One issue that came up was how to show them the DAX used for a measure within a Power BI report that had been published to Microsoft Fabric. To link working with measures in Power BI Desktop with working in Microsoft Fabric.
Kevin shows the normal way of doing this, as well as an alternative using the SemPy library.
Comments closedMikey Bronowski fixed a problem:
Regular execution of DBCC CHECKDB is a cornerstone practice for DBAs, ensuring that databases are free from corruption. However, this routine maintenance can sometimes feel more like a Herculean task, especially when DBCC CHECKDB runs slower than a snail in molasses, or worse, gets terminated because it runs too slow.
Read on to see what Mikey did to fix the issue. This is a good reminder that sometimes, there is no single silver bullet, but a whole magazine of lead can still get you to the same location.
Comments closedIn fact, I just fixed a stored procedure that had its performance change due to an upgrade to SQL Server 2022 last week. We were doing internal testing in our test environment and one proc suddenly took significantly longer than it should have. But it was also a proc that had not changed in months so it was very clear that the reason it became a problem was due to the upgrade.
Click through for some detail on how Deborah figured it out.
Comments closedAndy Brownsword describes working in the data mines:
Here’s the situation: a ticket was raised due to figures on different areas of the site not aligning. The ticket was to understand what was returning different data, why this was the case and investigate how we can resolve it.
Read on for an overview of the problem, what Andy did, and the root cause.
Comments closedAndy Mallon troubleshoots an issue:
In January, one of our Staff Engineers sent the following message to the DBRE help channel in Slack:
Morning folks, we had a pretty significant wait spike on the [database]. Circuit breakers closed and reopened quickly. Is anyone immediately aware of a reason why this could’ve happened?
Read on for Andy’s quick analysis and then the root cause and solution.
Comments closedEitan Blumin can’t reach quorum:
The incident started with a late-night phone call from one of our customers (it’s always a late-night phone call, isn’t it?).
They reported that during a DR exercise on their production environment (Chaos Engineering, anyone?) their entire cluster failed and they weren’t able to bring any of the replicas back online.
Click through for the full story, including what happened, why it happened, and what you can do to prevent similar problems in the future.
Comments closedReitse Eskens writes up a roundup about abandoned projects:
When I thought of this subject last year, I was really on the fence if it would work or not. Part of me was convinced it would elicit some response from the community, part of me was convinced people would be looking for a ‘happy’ start of the year and might not want to think or write about past learnings.
Part of me was right, but I never expected SO MANY of you to jump in and write so many wonderful blogs. It feels a bit unfair to summarise all your hard hard work, so please click the links to read the full stories. Well worth your time!
Click through for plenty of stories on the topic of lessons learned from abandoned projects.
Comments closedAndy Brownsword shares a warning:
A point of sale system being rolled out across hundreds of physical locations. Transaction data collected each night to be batch processed into a warehouse for usual types of analysis. Our integration preference was SSIS internally. A solution was deployed in preparation.
Rolling out of the new system started with a handful of locations which steadily increased as confidence grew. On the back of this the data hitting our solution was increasing too. With a trickle of data early on there were no issues as expected. A small volume of data from a small number of stores. The process flew. We left it doing it’s thing.
Read on to see the story take a darker turn and the importance of planning for scale.
Comments closedI didn’t get much of a chance to check out the posts as I was at the PASS Data Community Summit, but I came home and started to work through them.
This was the 8th one I’ve hosted, which makes sense as I’ve taken over managing the party from Adam Machanic and there have been a few places I’ve had to fill in for missing hosts. In any case, here’s the roundup. I’m going in order of the comments as I see them on the blog.
Click through for this month’s list of entrants.
Comments closedRob Farley eliminates a self-join:
Sometimes query tuning involves taking a different approach to a problem. And given that other tuning options might be creating index(es) or redesigning tables – both of which are much more permanent changes to an environment – rewriting a query can often be just right.
Window functions seem to pop up quite often when rewriting queries, and an example around this would be appropriate for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Steve Jones (@way0utwest at X/Twitter).
Read on for the all-too-common scenario and how Rob improves an existing query.
Comments closed