A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
It’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.
Comments closedWith 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.
Comments closedGarry 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.
Comments closedJeremy 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 closedStefanie Janine Stölting has a new release of pgsql_tweaks:
I decided to make this the 1.0 Version. The First commit is from 2017-08-11, the extension is now more than eight years old.
Click through for the updates in this version and a link to fetch the code.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino announces a new tool:
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates HammerDB benchmarking for SQL Server using Docker. If you’ve ever needed to run TPC-C or TPC-H benchmarks multiple times, you know how time-consuming the manual setup can be. This project removes the hassle and gets you up and running a single command:
./loadtest.sh.
Click through to learn more about the project and how you can grab the code.
Comments closedMike Robbins introduces Markdown:
Markdown is the standard for writing technical documentation at Microsoft and many other organizations. Its simplicity, readability, and compatibility with other tools make it an ideal choice for blogging, documenting software, procedures, APIs, and more. Whether you’re authoring a user guide, README, or knowledge base article, Markdown enables you to focus on content without getting bogged down in formatting.
As a technical writer, you’re expected to deliver clear, maintainable documentation that works across platforms. Markdown helps you do exactly that, with minimal friction.
The biggest challenge I experience with Markdown is figuring out what’s actually supported in some given implementation of Markdown. Most of the basics will be the same, but as soon as you get into things like nested lists, images, etc., support varies significantly.
Comments closedDavid Fitzjarrell looks at two classic tools:
Change is good, and occasionally Oracle changes utilities to make them easier to implement. Over the years a tool called LOGMINER has been available for various replication tasks, such as logical standby databases and an older product called STREAMS as well as updated tools such as Golden Gate. Let’s look into this topic again, with versions from 19c onward.
Click through for a bit of history on both tools, as well as where they’re at today.
Comments closed