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Category: Tools

Contrasting Redis and Memcached

Published 2021-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Shane Ducksbury has a showdown:

Caching is an important step in increasing the performance of many applications. It can be difficult to determine which caching solution is the best for your use case. Two likely contenders that will often make an appearance in your search for the answer are Redis vs Memcached.

In the green corner is Memcached (est. 2003), the classic, high performance caching solution. In the red corner is Redis, a slightly newer (est. 2009) but very mature and feature-rich caching in-memory database. Below, we’ll take a look at the differences between the two to help you make the decision which to choose.

I’ve personally had better experiences with Redis; my experience is that both work well from low to high load, and both have a tendency fall over at really high load.

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Creating a Database Publish Profile in Visual Studio

Published 2021-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Elizabeth Noble shows us how to create a database publish profile using Visual Studio:

One of our fears was always how to prevent losing data and critical data code. Here were publish profiles to our rescue. We also found that some of our database code had specific values depending on the environment or contained references to other databases. Once again, publish could solve these problems!

While I’d love to say that you could use ADS to manage your database projects, that just isn’t true right now. However, we have a way to help you get a publish profile created. If you don’t want to use Visual Studio yourself, you might want to ask your Developer friends real nice and see if they’d be willing to help you out.

Click through for a video and a sample of what a publish profile looks like.

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Azure Charts

Published 2021-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

This is an interesting site I just learned about this morning:

Project mission: Communicating Azure’s current state, structure and updates in a compact digestible way.

Concept: Cloud Charts Manifesto

Data sources: Public updates, RSS channels and web pages are used as primary data sources.


While developed by a Microsoft employee, Azure Charts is not a Microsoft service or product. This is a personal project, there are no implicit or explicit obligations related to it. If you want to receive updates about Azure Charts, feel free to follow or connect on LinkedIn.

It’s out of the norm for me to talk about a whole site like this, but I think it’s a really useful way of showing off these services in a non-confusing manner. It also gives some en passant insight on the relative interest in specific services based on industry.

If you do think this is interesting, please fill out a small form to make sure it stays public.

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Tips and Tricks for VS Code and Azure Data Studio

Published 2021-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shares some advice:

I really like Visual Studio Code. The more I use it, the more I get comfortable in it, and the more I appreciate the design and flow of using the editor. I didn’t feel that way early on, preferring the comfort of Visual Studio, but now I most often use VS Code.

The other day I saw an article from one of the PMs for the product, with a number of tips and tricks. I like some of these, and have already found a few to be handy in my work. 

Click through for more info. Switching to a new IDE can be challenging, but searching out tips and tricks like this can smooth out the transition period bumpiness and potentially unlock efficiencies you wouldn’t even have known about.

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Monitoring SSAS with Quest Spotlight

Published 2021-02-16 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin has two questions and two answers:

This post is just answering two simple questions:

1. Can Quest Software’s Spotlight successfully monitor SQL Server Analysis Server?

2. If it can, what SSAS parameters, databases’ and cubes’ details it monitors and provides information about?

First, it’s good to see Slava back in the saddle again. Second, click through for those answers. Slava also promises to check out some other SSAS monitoring tools, so stay tuned.

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5 Useful Tools for DBAs

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler recommends five helpful tools and products:

Backups are easily the most critical part of any DBA’s job so having a reliable way of managing them is essential. There are various tools and scripts out there but easily top of the tree for me is Minion Backup from Minionware.

Controlled by a number of configuration tables, it makes sceduling backups and configuring them down to a really granular level dead easy. If you’re like me and you’ve got a large number of databases on a server that each need to run on different days, go to different locations and need to run with different settings, Minion is about the only tool that I’ve found that lets me control things how I want without needing 101 different agent jobs. All your backups are controlled from a single agent job and that’s what I really love about it.

I’ve always liked Sean & Jen’s products, and would also recommend their indexing and CHECKDB solutions. David’s other suggestions are great as well.

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Tooling Outside of SQL Server

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason shares a few useful tools::

I’m a proponent of “Show me, don’t tell me”. Screen captures go a long way toward that. Sure, Windows has Paint, but Paint.NET is a bit more advanced. I almost always have an instance of it open in the background. Hit the Print Screen keyboard button and paste (CTRL + V) it into Paint.NET (you can also use the ALT + Print Screen key combination to screen capture just the active window). From there you can do anything: trim down to just a specific part of the image, add some red arrows or circles for emphasis, blur/obscur any sensitive data that’s in the image, etc. I take tweaked screen shots and paste them into just about anything…Word documents, email, even Twitter.

As far as it goes, I think I use different tools than Dave across the board, save for 7Zip. I like Notepad++, SnagIt, WinDirStat, LastPass, 7-Zip (yay for agreement), and mRemoteNG, and despites headphones respectively. But that goes to show that there are plenty of good alternatives for products and it’s worth trying a few out.

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Powershell Tools and Excel Tips

Published 2021-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret shares a few useful Powershell modules and follows up with tips for maximizing your Excel game:

Since I’ve written a lot about PowerShell previously, I wanted to highlight some other tools that I depend on. I’ve always been a fan of Excel, my personal life is full of spreadsheets – most decisions end with a spreadsheet (lucky for me, my wife is also a big fan of Excel!).  I often find myself copying data into Excel to keep track of work, or to quickly analyse data.  It’s also a great way of sharing data with a clear structure.  I’m also a big fan of shortcuts – so here’s a few I use often.

Jess also reminds me that it’s about time to tune up the bicycle…

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Comparing SSMS and Azure Data Studio

Published 2021-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin contrasts SQL Server Management Studio with Azure Data Studio:

Honestly, the vast majority of my time is split between Management Studio (SSMS) or Azure Data Studio. I’m pretty simple\straightforward this way. I started playing a lot more with Azure Data Studio over the past year, but I find I’m not able to make the switch to using it full time. It really depends on the task that I need to do.

So what tasks do I do often and which tool do I use?

The plus side for Azure Data Studio is that it’s far enough along that some of these choices are difficult to make. The minus side is that it’s still often on the losing end. I’d expect that shift to continue over the next couple of years as the product matures and becomes a good product for database developers.

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