A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
It’s been a busy few months working on scripts in my GitHub repo, including adding two new members to the family.
- sp_IndexCleanup: Easily deduplicate indexes — scripts all the changes out for you!
- sp_PerfCheck: A high-level review of performance-related settings and configurations!
Read on to see which other scripts have updates and where you can download all of Erik’s scripts.
Leave a CommentSunitha Muthukrishna takes us through a debugging exercise:
Debugging your code is important to identify issues and mitigate them when you’re working with user data functions in Microsoft Fabric. You want to make sure everything works as it should and that’s where local debugging lets you catch problems in your code without messing with the live environment. In this blog post, I will walk you through the steps to make local debugging easier and faster.
Click through to see what you’ll need, as well as the process to debug a function locally.
Leave a CommentI’ve been using it for about a month now, and I have been favorably impressed. It’s a lot better user experience than PGAdmin, has some additional features—like being able to easily export query results. Much like some of the other Azure Data solutions—you can also connect with Entra ID and navigate to your Azure resources. Beyond the basics—you can also use Copilot to chat with your database.
Click through for a demonstration of the extension.
Leave a CommentVlad Drumea points out a new thing to keep an eye on:
SQL Server 2025 provides ODBC sqlcmd version 17 which enforces an encrypted connection.
If you’re trying to use it to connect to instances that don’t have a CA-signed certificate or where TLS encryption was never properly configured, sqlcmd will throw the famous “certificate chain not trusted” error message:
Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server : SSL Provider: The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.
Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server : Client unable to establish connection.
The proper answer to this is to get trusted certificates. The workaround is what Vlad describes, so click through for that.
Comments closedDavid Wiseman shows off an open-source product:
For T-SQL Tuesday #186, Andy Levy asks, “How do you manage and/or monitor your SQL Server Agent jobs?”
This is a great opportunity for me to discuss how DBA Dash can help monitor SQL Agent jobs. DBA Dash is a free and open-source monitoring tool for SQL Server, created by me. It’s used to monitor thousands of SQL Server instances within Trimble alone, and it’s gaining popularity in the SQL Server community.
Read on to see how the product can help if you have a series of SQL Agent jobs.
Comments closedErik Darling has a new stored procedure:
A comprehensive SQL Server performance diagnostic tool that quickly identifies configuration issues, capacity problems, and performance bottlenecks at both server and database levels.
Erik also has an introduction video on the topic.
Comments closedJeff Iannucci announces a new stored procedure:
Most database folks might know the tempdb database in SQL Server is used for temporary tables, but many folks don’t realize all the other things that use this critical system database.
It’s also used by table variables, cursors, aggregations, joins, and sorts. And by memory spills when you don’t have enough memory. And by integrity checks that you run regularly to check for corruption. And more.
Optimal performance of tempdb is vital, as it is involved constantly with all your database queries. So…is your tempdb configured and running optimally? And if it isn’t, can you tell why?
Click through to see how it works and where you can get a free copy.
Comments closedIn general, the process to build and manage both models and reports in Power BI can be simplified to a few sequential steps that describe the “lifecycle” of this content. You can see this depicted below, as well as some examples of the various tools that you might use to support each of these steps. Shameless plug, Bravo, Vertipaq Analyzer, and Analyze in Excel were created by SQLBI, and SQLBI is involved in the development of DAX Studio, DAX Optimizer, and Tabular Editor.
Click through for an interesting table showing what fits where. If all you’re using is Power BI Desktop, there’s a whole world of additional functionality you’re missing out on.
Comments closedYohann Mansiaux steps through the code:
We are going to see how to use these functions in VSCode, as well as introducing “breakpoints”. Breakpoints are markers that you can set in your code to pause execution at a specific line. This allows you to inspect the state of your code at that point and step through it line by line. They are very close to the
browser()function. They can also be used in RStudio IDE, but I have to admit that I never used them.
Read on to see how VSCode fills the need when it comes to debugging code. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closedErik Darling announces a tool.
If you’ve given Erik money in the past (which I can confirm is an easy enough task). If you’ve used sp_WhoIsActive to write to a table, you’ve got an idea of how it will work. But this looks quite a bit easier than setting it all up yourself.
And the next time you run into Josh Darnell, say thank you.
Comments closed