A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Rob Sewell shows off a repository:
Today I want to talk about fabric-toolbox, the Microsoft-sponsored, community-driven repository of accelerators, tools, and utilities that exists specifically to help Fabric users get further, faster.
Read on to learn more about what fabric-toolbox is, why it’s interesting, and what Rob’s next blog posts on the topic will cover.
Leave a CommentVibhor Kumar describes a PostgreSQL extension:
That’s the promise of pg_background: execute SQL asynchronously in background worker processes inside PostgreSQL, so your client session can move on—while the work runs in its own transaction.
It’s a deceptively simple superpower:
- Kick off a long-running query (or maintenance) without holding the client connection open
- Run “autonomous transaction”-style side effects (commit/rollback independent of the caller)
- Monitor, wait, detach, or cancel explicitly
- Keep the operational model “Postgres-native” instead of adding another job system
Read on to learn more about it, including tips on how to use it and some examples of when you might want to use it.
Leave a CommentErik Darling announces a new open-source product:
That is, if you survive the installation process. Active Directory. Domain accounts. Firewalls. Security policies. Additional database servers. Annoying.
Or just send everything to the cloud, somewhere.
I got real tired of dealing with that, so I built a free, open-source SQL Server performance monitoring tool that isn’t any of those things, and doesn’t suck.
This does sound pretty neat, and the Lite version in particular is very intriguing in places where you can’t (or don’t want to) touch the servers.
3 CommentsJeff Iannucci announces a new procedure:
SQL Server Availability Groups can be a great feature to help support your High Availability needs, but what happens when they fail to work as expected?
Do you have an expiring certificate on used by an endpoint? Do you have timeout settings that could contribute to unexpected failovers? Are you suffering from a high number of HADR_SYNC_COMMIT waits?
We’ve seen all those things happen, and like Marvin Gaye we’ve wondered: what’s going on? And we’ve wanted a tool to help us see if other clients were having these problems, and more.
Read on for more information and check it out yourself.
Comments closedDave Page announces a new load testing tool:
Most database benchmarking tools focus on raw throughput: how many queries per second can the database handle at maximum load? Whilst this is valuable information, it tells us little about how a system will cope with real-world usage patterns.
Consider a typical e-commerce platform. Traffic peaks during lunch breaks and evenings, drops off overnight, and behaves differently at weekends compared to weekdays. A stock trading application has intense activity during market hours and virtually none outside them. These temporal patterns matter enormously for capacity planning, replication testing, and failover validation.
Click through for more information, as well as a link to the pgEdge Load Generator GitHub repo.
Comments closedI have had a number of requests for me to update the tSqlt Test Adapter over the years so it would work with more recent versions of Visual Studio. I finally got around to doing this and I am pleased to say that the new version works with VS 2022, 2025 and should continue to work in future releases.
Between Visual Studio 2017 and 2019 the changes required were minimal but between 2017 and 2022 the changes meant a rewrite of the test adapter visual studio integration parts which meant it wasn’t a simple change.
Read on for information on how to install and use the extension.
Comments closedKamil Nowinski provides an overview of the FabricTools Powershell module:
Managing Microsoft Fabric at scale quickly becomes painful if you rely only on the UI. Workspaces, capacities, and tenant-level settings all need repeatable, scriptable management. FabricTools is a community-driven PowerShell module that fills this gap by adding high‑level cmdlets focused on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI administration.
In this post, you will learn what FabricTools is, how to install it from the PowerShell Gallery, and how to list all Fabric workspaces and export them to a CSV file for further analysis.
I was going to say “It looks a lot like DBATools” and then I realized that several of the contributors are DBATools mainstays, so that makes sense.
Comments closedDavid Fitzjarrell lays out a comparison:
Depending upon which tool is used query plans can change. There are two provided by Oracle, SQL*Plus and SQL Developer, and how they treat bind variables can alter execution plans. Let’s look into that and see what may be the cause.
SQL*Plus has been around for quite a while and is a very mature product. SQL Developer also has a long history, not quire as long as SQL*Plus but is well beyond the early phases of development. Both are excellent tools, returning reliable and repeatable results, but SQL Developer may take some liberties SQL*Plus doesn’t, especially where bind variables are involved. SQL*Plus and PL/SQL allow the developer to define data types for bind variables, and will pass those values through unchanged. SQL Developer, however, appears to pass such values using a character data type regardless whether the value is a string or numeric, allowing Oracle to ‘decide’ how to optimize the query. This can produce sometimes ‘unexplained’ results with estimates and execution plans.
Read on for an example in which the choice of tool can add a considerable percentage to the expected length of the query. The tricky part here is that this doesn’t mean the query actually takes longer, but that expectations will differ.
Comments closedErik Darling has a new tool available. This link goes to a video Erik created on the topic. Erik pokes fun at Microsoft naming, but I think Erik could make use of Microsoft marketing. That way, they can change the names of all of his procedures every six months. Oh, and three of them will be called sp_Mirroring while being quite different.
And the script is available on Erik’s GitHub repo.
Comments closedAntoine Soetewey announces a new tool:
I am pleased to announce the publication of our paper “AssociationExplorer: A user-friendly Shiny application for exploring associations and visual patterns” in the journal SoftwareX, together with the official release of the AssociationExplorer2 R package on CRAN.
Both the paper and the software are part of an open-science effort aimed at making exploratory data analysis more accessible to non-technical users.
Read on to learn more about the tool and how you can get it. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closed