A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jon Vöge declares a hostile takeover:
Now, how you best maintain multiple copies/variants of the same Semantic Model is a whole other discussion but as a one-off, I was asked to merge the Measures of the two models.
Initially, the question actually stumped me as my usual tool of choice for external manipulation of semantic models Tabular Editor does not have a great native way to solve this.
Jon lists a variety of options and then gets the job done with ALM Toolkit.
Leave a CommentLucas Kartawidjaja gives us a blast from the past:
When dealing with data inside SQL Server, especially when it’s delimited by a clear separator character, earlier versions (before SQL Server 2016) required us to write custom parsing functions—either as T-SQL user-defined functions or CLR functions. Starting with SQL Server 2016, we can use the built-in STRING_SPLIT() function to handle most of these tasks.
However, more often than not, we need to parse data that resides outside SQL Server—for example, in log files, CSV data, or other data sources. For these cases, I often use Microsoft Log Parser, a free command-line tool available here.
Click through for a demonstration of how it works. Or a reminder, if you’ve been in the business for a long long time.
Leave a CommentFor this weeks blog, a quick tip about a feature in Power BI desktop which had flow entirely over my head: You can use RegEx for Find & Replace operations in Power BI Desktop TMDL View!
Yes! You heard that right!
I had no idea, until I caught it in a live demo by Power BI partner director Mohammad Ali at his Power BI Next Step keynote.
Read on to see what you can do with this. The same is possible in other tools like Visual Studio Code and even SQL Server Management Studio, though what specific regular expression capabilities are available and the exact syntax for them will differ based on the product.
Leave a CommentBrent Ozar tries out a new feature of SQL Server Management Studio:
The maximum tuning time defaults to 300 seconds, but I tacked on a couple zeroes because my slow query already took ~20 seconds to run on its own, and I wanted to give the wizard time to wave his little wand around. The tool actually runs your query repeatedly with different hints, so if you have a 5-minute query, you’ll need to give the tool more time.
Click Start, and it begins running your query with different hints. A couple minutes later, I got:
Brent’s review is quite positive, in a “This is way better than the alternative of doing nothing” sense.
Leave a CommentIt’s been a while since we made some improvements to the public version of sp_CheckSecurity, but internally we’ve been busy fine tuning checks and adding even more to discover potential vulnerabilities in your SQL Server instances.
Today we’re announcing a new version that includes additions, corrections, and a few other adjustments that should be helpful. Here’s what new!
Read on to see what has changed.
Leave a CommentWith the recent data center fire and missing government data in South Korea, it felt like a good time to continue with the SQL Server Regrets series of blog posts. We’ll talk about the confusion of thinking you are covered for recoverability – when you just aren’t. This “Regret” comes up far too often when a new client comes in with ongoing backup issues.
Mike gives some real-world and some hypothetical examples around why different teams in a company might be confused around what they’re getting from their SQL Server backups and Mike promotes Jeff Iannucci’s sp_CheckBackup stored procedure as a starting point.
Leave a CommentGarry Bargsley tries out DBeaver:
Whether you’re a seasoned DBA or just exploring database tools, DBeaver offers a powerful, cross-platform GUI for interacting with PostgreSQL and many other databases. As a continuation of the previous blog post on installing PostgreSQL, this guide will walk through installing DBeaver and setting up a connection to the PostgreSQL instance we created.
My biggest takeaway the last time I used DBeaver was, SQL Server has a great thing going with SSMS. But in fairness, that was a while ago and things could very well have gotten better in the meantime. Also, if you have to connect to a variety of data platforms, DBeaver is a pretty solid choice.
Leave a CommentJeremy Schneider performs some tests:
This is a follow‑up to the last article: Run Jepsen against CloudNativePG to see sync replication prevent data loss. In that post, we set up a Jepsen lab to make data loss visible when synchronous replication was disabled — and to show that enabling synchronous replication prevents it under crash‑induced failovers.
Since then, I’ve been trying to make data loss happen more reliably in the “async” configuration so students can observe it on their own hardware and in the cloud. Along the way, I learned that losing data on purpose is trickier than I expected.
Click through to learn more. Jepsen has been the gold standard in testing distributed database systems for data loss.
Comments closedRecently, I had to export some query results to CSV and Excel. One of the columns was extremely large query text which was defined as NVARCHAR(MAX). Here are some of the issues I faced with this request and how I over came them.
SSIS or the Import/Export wizard is fine. This is also a good use case for bcp or writing your own query using dbatools and outputting the results to file.
Comments closedErik Darling digs into Windows Performance Recorder. This is definitely a more advanced tool for analysis, and Erik focuses on call stack time for two given queries. Windows Performance Recorder isn’t something I’ve really used before, though Erik’s demo does show some of the power of the tool.
Comments closed