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Category: Tools

CPU Monitoring in SQL Server with Datadog

Published 2024-11-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little has a recommendation:

What makes me a raving fan is the flexibility of Datadog’s notebooks and dashboards, combined with the ability to create all sorts of custom metrics and monitors. There are always things in SQL Server monitoring packs that I have strong opinions about. Datadog lets me take what I want, build what I need that isn’t contained in that, and ignore the rest. For a team that has the budget to afford Datadog paired with dedicated database staff with the time and resources to do this work, this can be a great fit.

One of the weirdest and worst parts of the Datadog SQL Server monitoring tooling, though, is how it handles wait stats. In my opinion, it’s a case of someone reinventing a wheel that didn’t need to be reinvented, and then not documenting what they did clearly (at least not in a way I can find).

Two of the most confusing Datadog “waits” are labeled “CPU” and “Waiting on CPU”. I opened a support ticket with Datadog a while back to ask what these are, because I couldn’t find any way they correspond to actual wait stats in SQL Server. I learned they aren’t wait stats at all. In fact, I think you should largely ignore them. Here’s why.

Read on for the full story.

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A Review of Stellar Repair for MSSQL

Published 2024-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen shares a product review:

Stellar Repair for MS SQL is a tool that greatly simplifies one of all time most dreaded tasks of DBAs and DBREs. Recovering a database that has, for one reason or another, become corrupt.

In this post, I go through one of the more common types of database corruption scenarios, and using Stellar Repair for MS SQL to get the database back up and running.

Click through for the review.

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Configuring SQL Server Alerts in SQLMonitor

Published 2024-11-07 by Kevin Feasel

Ajay Dwivedi has an update to SQLMonitor:

If you are responsible for managing & monitoring SQLServers, then it is mandatory to have monitoring and alerting for critical issues of your SQL Servers.

For this purpose, open source SQLMonitor now has built-in Alert Engine. With the capability of this alert engine, alerts can be sent to Slack & Email to various teams. The following are some advantages –

Read on to see some of those capabilities and how to set things up.

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The Power of pg_dump

Published 2024-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Haas talks up pg_dump:

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool?. In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that it’s probably shouldn’t be your primary backup mechanism. For that, you probably shouldn’t directly use anything that is included in PostgreSQL itself, but rather a well-maintained third-party backup tool such as barman or pgbackrest. But today, I want to talk a little more about why I believe that pg_dump is both amazingly useful for solving all kinds of PostgreSQL-related problems and also just a great piece of technology.

The core value proposition of pg_dump is that the output is human-readable text. You’ll get DDL commands that you can use to recreate your database objects, and you’ll get COPY commands (or INSERTs, if you so request) that you can use to reload your table data. That is not really an advantage if you’re just trying to back up and restore an entire database cluster, because converting all of your data from PostgreSQL’s internal formats into text and back again is going to use a bunch of CPU resources. If you instead take and restore a physical backup, you can avoid all of that overhead.

Read on for scenarios in which pg_dump can be quite useful.

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Variable Types in Postman

Published 2024-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Huyen Maithi talks variables:

Variables enable you to store and reuse values. Postman is a powerful API development tool that offers a feature known as environment variables. These variables help you work efficiently, collaborate with teammates in testing and development by allowing users to easily manage dynamic values across requests.

Click through for an overview of the types of variables you can create for Postman requests.

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Working with Parquet Files in Postgres

Published 2024-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Craig Kerstiens announces an extension:

Today, we’re excited to release pg_parquet – an open source Postgres extension for working with Parquet files. The extension reads and writes parquet files to local disk or to S3 natively from Postgres. With pg_parquet you’re able to:

  • Export tables or queries from Postgres to Parquet files
  • Ingest data from Parquet files to Postgres
  • Inspect the schema and metadata of existing Parquet files

Code is available at: https://github.com/CrunchyData/pg_parquet/.

Read on for more background on why we built pg_parquet or jump below to get a walkthrough of working with it.

Hey, that’s my job to tell people to read on to learn more!

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Building a Data Detective Toolkit

Published 2024-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Deb Melkin talks tools:

Happy T-SQL Tuesday! I wasn’t really sure I’d be able to crank something out for this one but somehow I managed to squeeze it in. Tim Mitchell ( b ) is hosting and he has a great topic for us: What’s in our Data Detective toolkit?

I love this topic for so many reasons. Partly because I feel like I’m asked to look at so many projects where I’m dropped in and asked to figure things out, usually performance related but occasionally new functionality or features. But as I’m asked to do this fairly often, I may have to see if Data Detective can be my new title… hmm…

Being a Data Detective in a film noir. On the one hand, that sounds like a really neat idea. On the other hand, things usually don’t turn out so well for the detective.

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Creating Profiles in Visual Studio Code and Azure Data Studio

Published 2024-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, I show off a not-so-well-known capability in Visual Studio Code and Azure Data Studio: creating profiles.

Profiles are very useful in Visual Studio Code, though probably less useful for Azure Data Studio. I think the primary benefit to that would be handling things like zoom levels and menu layouts when you switch from a laptop on the go to something plugged into a larger monitor.

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