Tools – Page 19 – Curated SQL

Importing Perfmon Data Into SQL Server

Published 2020-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

If you followed the last video, I showed you how to set up windows perfmon for ongoing performance metric collection on all of your critical SQL Server machines. However, having this raw data in a portable format doesn’t mean you have an easy means to access that data. In this training video, I show you a PowerShell script that we released that helps you export this data into a SQL Server database table so that you have access to the raw data to perform ongoing performance analysis with whatever favorite tool you prefer.

David walks through the process in a video, so check it out.

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SQL Server Management Studio 18.7

Published 2020-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa announces SQL Server Management Studio version 18.7 is now generally available:

Policy-based management is accessed in SQL Server Management Studio under “Management” in the object explorer as “Policy Management”. Getting started with policy-based management can be accelerated by importing the sample policies available for SQL Server. In September, these policies were added to the open source collection of SQL Server samples to facilitate their use and improvement. You can access these sample policies on the GitHub repository and your contributions to these best practices are welcome. For more information on Policy-Based Management, please check out the documentation.

I think Policy-Based Management is one of the biggest missed opportunities in SQL Server. They came out with a good start in 2008 but the product stagnated after that and it remains under-utilized as a result. Perhaps open-sourcing the policies will help, as the key problem with PBM was how limited it was.

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Issues Using EF Core Database First to Reverse Engineer SQL Server Databases

Published 2020-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Ejlskov Jensen takes us through several things to watch out for when reverse engineering a SQL Server database in Entity Framework Core:

Issue
SQL Server allows blank column names in tables, but this causes the following error when scaffolding: The string argument 'originalIdentifier' cannot be empty.
Workarounds
– Use EF Core Power Tools, which contains a fix for this. (Fix will also be in EF Core 6.0)
– Rename the column 🙂

Click through for several more issues and solutions in this vein.

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Looking at BDC in Kubernetes with Lens

Published 2020-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mohammad Darab shows off a tool to monitor the Kubernetes cluster driving a Big Data Cluster:

I don’t recall how I came across this Kubernetes IDE called Lens, but all I know is it’s cool as hec! It connects to a Kubernetes cluster (using the kube config file) and gives you an in depth view of all the different Kubernetes objects, their associated yaml files, health/metrics, etc. In this blog post I will show you how we can look into a Big Data Cluster’s Kubernetes infrastructure using Lens.

Click through for instructions on installation, as well as how to use the product.

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Stellar Repair: A Review

Published 2020-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey reviews a product which attempts to repair corrupted SQL Server databases:

Let’s start with the most important piece of information you need: it works.
The software itself is really simple to use and just does what you need, repairs your corrupted SQL Server instance. On that alone, I can recommend the tool.
However, there are a few gotchas I ran into along the way. Mostly, little stuff. It’s things a little polish in the UI and some clean up around language could help out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with this software. It worked. It’s just how it works that we should talk about.

Click through for Grant’s full review.

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Keeping .NET Tools Up to Date

Published 2020-07-31 by Kevin Feasel

Max Trinidad has a public service announcement for us:

Have you installed any of the .NET Tools? Such as “.NET Interactive” and “PowerShell Global“, then you’ll need to remember, to update these tools manually.
These tools give you the ability to use create Jupyter Notebook using Python Kernel but also with C#, F#, and PowerShell 7 kernels.

Read on to see how to check if you need to update either of these.

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Breaking Changes in Microsoft.Data.SqlClient 2.0

Published 2020-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Ejlskov Jensen goes over the list of breaking changes with the most recent version of Microsoft.Data.SqlClient:

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient version 2 has just been released. This library is the latest and greatest .NET client driver for SQL Server and Azure SQL Database – and will be used by EF Core 5. In addition to a number of new features (which I blogged about earlier), this major version release also includes a number of breaking changes.

Click through for the list.

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The Origins of SentryOne Plan Explorer

Published 2020-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Hall gives us a bit of history:

Greg saw a need in his own work, and I was seeing a need in the field with our customers, for a way to go beyond identifying high-impact queries. DBAs and developers needed a way to tune queries surfaced by SentryOne SQL Sentry’s Top SQL without fiddling with a lot of extra tools to get there. We were already building integration with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), which included graphical query plans, so the original thought was to extend that integration from SentryOne with a link that opened plans in SSMS from Top SQL in SQL Sentry.
It seemed like an elegant solution that would allow us to reuse some code, but it wasn’t long before Brooke Philpott discovered that we wouldn’t be able to get what we needed this way. That particular part of SSMS wasn’t exposed to us in the manner we needed. Par for the course, we weren’t going to let that stop us from filling the need. Greg and Brooke dug into the problem to discover a mix of documentation, flow controls, and ingenuity that would provide the foundation for building our own query plan visuals.

Read on for the story and a bit about how the product has morphed through the years.

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mssql-cli Generally Available on MacOS and Linux

Published 2020-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the general availability of mssql-cli outside of Windows:

We are excited to announce that mssql-cli is now generally available on macOS and Linux.
mssql-cli is an open source and cross-platform command-line tool (CLI) to manage SQL Server on-prem and on the cloud. We are a proud member of the dbcli family of open source command line tools to manage relational databases.
If you are a user of sqlcmd, you will love the interactive and modern design components in mssql-cli. With this release, you will also be able to use mssql-cli in non-interactive scenarios such as scripting and automation. Read on to learn more about how mssql-cli will help improve your productivity through a modern CLI experience.

If you love the command line (or simply need to SSH into a box from time to time), give this product a try.

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Poor SQL Formatter’s SSMS Plugin

Published 2020-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Bland shows us the Poor SQL formatter for SQL Server Management Studio:

So what is PoorSQL Formatter? Well, as you probably know, formatting is very important when writing T-SQL code. While we try to format our code as we write it, sometimes the code we need to review was written by someone else and maybe doesn’t follow formatting standards. This is where PoorSQL Formatter will come in handy. It will help us take the poorly written code and format it in a manner that is more in line with T-SQL formatting best practices. The best part, it will do the formatting in seconds.

I’ve used that website many a time. It’s not as detailed as I want it to be, but if you just need a quick and dirty way to format a query so that it’s understandable, this does the trick.

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Category: Tools