A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Eitan Blumin shares some recommendations of tools:
While I do feel that the tools that make my job the most awesome are those that help me with productivity, this month’s topic is a bit broader. Most of these, though, are widely known, so I’m not going to go into much detail about them.
Click through for Eitan’s suggestions. I use the majority of these (or at least some alternative) but there are some new and interesting ones for me.
2 CommentsJohn McCormack reviews several community tools for SQL Server:
Statistics Parser is a web page which allows you to paste in the statistics time,io output from the SSMS messages tab, and it formats into neat tables showing how much IO happens for each table. It is immediately easier to read and you get a handy % column on the right hand side showing you which tables are being read the most. I find this really useful for query tuning because it lets me know where my biggest pain points are. For complex queries, which touch a lot of tables, it just makes it easy to see at a glance where you should initially focus your attention. It also shows worktable and workfile tables which serves as a handy hint that tempdb is in play.
John lists a half-dozen but really drives in on Statistics Parser.
Comments closedDrew Skwiers-Koballa gives us an update on where SQL Server tooling is at:
The December releases of Azure Data Studio 1.25 and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18.8 are now generally available. Additionally, the mssql extension for Visual Studio Code has recently been updated to version 1.10.0. Read on to learn more about each of these updates and grab the latest versions of SSMS, Azure Data Studio, or the mssql extension for VS Code.
Read on to learn more.
Comments closedI announce something I didn’t do:
I wanted to announce the first open source project officially released by ChannelAdvisor: the QDS Toolbox. This is an effort which Pablo Lozano and Efraim Sharon pushed hard internally and several database administrators and database engineers contributed to (though I wasn’t one of them).
Pablo, Efraim, &co have done a great job with this, so check out the repo.
Comments closedGreg Gonzalez announces the news:
SolarWinds recently announced the intention to acquire SentryOne, an event that promises to make life even better for the IT and data professionals who use our products. Both companies have historically focused—in their own ways—on solving real-life problems for customers by providing high-quality solutions.
I do wonder what will happen given that SolarWinds already has a database monitoring tool; will they keep the two separate, combine them together, or do something else?
Comments closedDavid Klee continues a video series:
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.
Comments closedDrew 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.
Comments closedIssue
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.
Comments closedMohammad 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.
Comments closedGrant 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.
Comments closed