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Category: Tools

Postgres Tooling: Rant and Recommendations

Published 2019-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz is not pleased with the current state of tooling for Postgres:

/* Begin Brief Soapbox*/
Honestly, this is by far one of my biggest grips about Open Source software now that I’m older, busier, and don’t want to spin my wheels trying to make something simple work. When the tools make it hard to dig in and work effectively with the database, most developers and shops will default to code-first/ORM only development. In nearly 20 years of software development and leading multiple teams, I’m still surprised how little most developers really care about effectively using a database of any kind. During most interviews only about 30% of applicants can ever answer a few basic SQL questions. And now I think I’m starting to understand why. Most of them have been relegated to an Open Source world with Open Source tooling when it comes to SQL. Yes, it’s cheap and allows projects to spin up quickly, but once those students get past their little pizza ordering app from CompSci 402, they’ll be lost in the real world.
/* End Brief Soapbox */

I completely agree with the tooling point. Having worked with Postgres and MySQL a little bit makes me appreciate Management Studio (for all its flaws) all the more. If you want Azure Data Studio to support Postgres, there’s a GitHub issue that you can vote up.

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Creating Benchmarks With WorkloadTools

Published 2019-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Gianluca Sartori announces a new tool:

Throughout my career, I had to go through the pain of benchmarking often enough to get fed up with all the existing tools and decide to code my own. The result of this endeavor is WorkloadTools: a collection of tools to collect, analyze and replay SQL Server workloads, on premises and in the cloud.

At the moment, the project includes 3 tools:
– SqlWorkload – a command line tool to capture, replay and analyze a workload
– ConvertWorkload – a command line tool to convert existing workloads (traces and extended events) to the format used by SqlWorkload
– WorkloadViewer – a GUI tool to visualize and analyze workload data

Click through for the link to check it out.

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How’s My Database?

Published 2019-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Janik has a Windows app for you:

There are actually about 40 things it checks for.

Current limitations are that queries with a cursor or temp table are not analyzed. There’s also a bug where the missing indexes and warnings appear on the wrong node/operator. Since the tool is using estimated plans at the moment, it may not be as accurate.

I’m planning on a few new features in the next month to add feeding the utility a query plan and displaying the original query. I’m also planning on adding history and the ability to execute a query from the tool. Before we get to those we need to fix some known bugs though. I’m hoping that you. Yes! you can help me identify other bugs to make this a great tool for the SQL community.

The product is in beta, so check it out and send Daniel some feedback.

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Kafka Cruise Control Frontend

Published 2019-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Naresh Kumar Vudutha announces the Kafka Cruise Control Frontend:

For those that may be unfamiliar, Cruise Control features include:

1. Kafka broker resource utilization tracking
2. The ability to query the latest replica state (offline, URP, out of sync) from brokers
3. Goal-based resource distribution
4. Anomaly detection with self-healing
5. Admin operations on Kafka (add/remove/demote brokers, rebalance cluster, run PLE)

In this post, we will take a look at the frontend for Cruise Control, which provides a birds-eye view of all the Kafka installations and provides a single place to manage all of them.

That’s a lot of functionality in one tool.

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Apps To Manage SQL Server On Azure VMs

Published 2019-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant has a list of tools you can use to manage SQL Server on Azure VMs:

From experience I know it’s important to know what applications you can use locally with Azure to manage SQL Server solutions. So you have the right tools for the job.

For instance, I was talking with some people at a client’s site the other day about deciding what application to use to future proof themselves.

In this post I will cover applications for use with Windows, MacOS and Linux distributions. 

I don’t think I’m spoiling too much in saying that about 80% of these are the same tools you would use for on-prem work.

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SQL Undercover Inspector V1.3

Published 2019-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Adrian Buckman announces a new version of the SQL Undercover team’s Inspector:

We know some of you really hate linked servers so we have been working on a powershell collection which will allow you to install the inspector without using linked servers to centrally log the information and instead the powershell function Invoke-SQLUndercoverInspector will do the rest for you (We will be writing a blog post about how you can use this soon) – this is currently a pre-release version so it’s a work in progress – I must say a massive thank you to Shane O’Neill (b | t) without his powershell skills this wouldn’t turned out as well as it has, thanks Shane!

If you’ve already downloaded this version, be aware that there is a hotfix.

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SQL-to-Excel: A Tool For Automating Exports To Excel

Published 2018-11-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason has written a command line tool for Excel-based productivity:

In 2018, I’ve found myself frequently running a series of static SQL Server queries and copying/pasting the output of each query into a separate sheet in a Microsoft Excel Worksheet file. They say if you perform a manual task X number of times or more, you should automate it. Great advice, right? There are a number of ways to export SQL Server query results to Excel, and an internet search readily turns up many options. I didn’t find any that suited my needs, so I wrote my own utility, uncleverly named “SQL to Excel”.

SQL to Excel is a modest command line utility. It iterates though a folder of *.sql script files, executing each script, capturing the script query output, and writing the results to a Microsoft Excel Worksheet file (one worksheet per script file). And yes, it’s an actual Excel file, not a .csv file. The C# code for SQL to Excel is available as a GitHub repository.

Click through for more details.  This sounds a bit more robust than building Integration Services packages to do the same.

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Reminder: Windows Server Still Exists

Published 2018-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Allan Hirt reminds us that Windows Server is still an important product:

If you’ve been in hibernation, today you woke up to a world where Microsoft has embraced open source and Linux. What was once unthinkable is now happening. What is going on? Why am I even talking about this?

Since the introduction of SQL Server 2017 and the support for Linux-based deployments, I’ve had a steady stream of questions from C-levels on down to DBAs asking in essence this: “Do I need to abandon SQL Server on Windows Server and learn Linux?” I would use something stronger if this was a casual conversation, but the answer is an emphatic “NO!” SQL Server still runs just fine and is supported on Windows Server (including Windows Server 2019, which is just released). Support is not ending any time soon. Linux is just another option and there may be enhancements specific to each platform because of their differences. It’s not an “either/or” thing. So breathe, OK? If you have a use case for Linux, by all means deploy SQL Server on it.

I am on the SQL on Linux bandwagon and enjoy the path that Microsoft is forging, but Allan provides us a critical tonic in this regard.

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In Praise Of Tabular Editor

Published 2018-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares a positive review of Tabular Editor, a community tool for working with Tabular models:

What tool do you use for Analysis Services Tabular development? SSDT right, what else? Here is a little secret. I almost don’t use SSDT anymore, except for limited tasks, such as importing new tables and visualizing relationships. I switched to a great community tool – Tabular Editor and you should too if you’re frustrated with the SSDT Tabular Designer. Back in 2012 Microsoft ported the Power Pivot designer to SSDT to let BI practitioners implement Tabular models. This is why you still get weird errors that Excel has encountered some error. Microsoft haven’t made any “professional” optimizations despite all the attention that Tabular gets. As a result, developers face:

  • Performance issues – As your model grows in complexity, it gets progressively slower for even simple changes, such as renaming columns. The problem of course is that any change results in a commit operation to the workspace database. SSDT requires a workspace database for the Data View but it slows down all tasks even if it doesn’t have data. While the data view is useful for data analysts, I’d personally rather sacrifice it to gain development speed.

  • The horrible measure grid – Enough said. To Microsoft credit, the Tabular Explorer helps somewhat but it still doesn’t support the equivalent of the SSAS MD script editor.

  • No automation for repetitive tasks – It’s not unusual to create many measure variants, such as YTD, QTD. SSDT doesn’t help much automating them.

It does look interesting.

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