A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Bang Nguyen wants to see what’s going on:
Observability of a system includes Logging, Tracing and Metric. Today, we will go to detail how to implement observability’s elements on a K8S environment use Promtail, Open Telemetry Collector, Loki, Tempo and Grafana bellow is the demonstration of system we will implement
Click through for a detailed guide showing how to do this.
Comments closedSteve Jones is speaking my language:
I had a customer recently ask if SQL Compare could show them the differences in two scripts they’ve written. They weren’t using version control (tsk, tsk, shame), but saw SQL Compare and the “Scripts folder” option. This isn’t used for random scripts, but I do have a better solution: KDiff3.
KDiff is an old project that is used to analyze multiple files and merge the differences. There is an archived SoundForge location, but the more modern version is here. That’s the current code location, and you can see the readme for details. To get started, download and install it.
I remember (cue “Pepperidge Farms Remembers” meme) back when kdiff3 was only available in KDE. That’s when I first learned of it, and ever since there was a Windows port, I’ve been a dedicated user. Yes, it’s an old tool, but it works really well.
Comments closedSteve Jones is resting his mouse-clicking finger:
Recently a customer was looking to automate some of their SQL Compare checks, but they wanted to do this in a dynamic way, since they needed to do this at scale. Their idea was to not have a SQL Compare project, but build a mapping at the command line.
This post addresses a part of their issue. This will look at how to set up a basic SQL Compare command line.
Read on to see how. This is something I did a while back as well, though it was quite a while ago (say, 8-9 years ago) and required us to do some DLL weirdness back then. Once we got it working, however, it did a good job.
Comments closedGerhard Brueckl has been busy:
I am working a lot with Power BI in my daily business and there have always been a couple of things that bothered me since the very beginning. Most of this is related to the web UI and its usability, mainly that you need too many clicks to get to where you want (e.g. viewing Datasets refreshes) but also that some features are simply not exposed in the UI that are possible with the Power BI REST APIs (e.g. rebinding a report to another dataset). So I thought there must be some better way to do this and make management and usability of Power BI easier and I came up with the idea for a Visual Studio Code extension for Power BI to close this gap.
Read on to see how it works, how you can get it, and what Gerhard has in mind for it over the short term.
Comments closedOne of the things that is lacking in the community is for some simple dump analysis for SQL Server, well no longer!
Introducing the Beta version of SQL Dump Analysis… sure it’s not super pretty, sure it’s not 100% yet… but it’ll give you the basic goods and get you on your way.
This is a website you upload SQL dumps to, rather than an executable you’d download. Still, check it out.
Comments closedRod Edwards looks at deadlocks:
I’ve also included a REALLY useful bit of functionality in a common free tool that you may not expect. Simply scroll to the to the end for it if you’re up to speed with Deadlocks already, or don’t want to read my inane rambles.
So we know what a deadlock is, multiple queries all contending for resources, one query holds some resources and is waiting on resources that another query has. That second query isn’t giving the resources up and is waiting for resources that the first query has. Both are stubborn, neither are releasing what they have until they completed…so we have a standoff.
Read on to learn a bit more about the mechanics behind deadlocks, as well as how Plan Explorer makes life easier.
Comments closedJosh Darnell goes hunting for the problem:
A colleague reached out to me while they were doing some routine maintenance on a web server. One of our app pools was sitting at around 25-35% CPU usage, despite the fact that no one was using this particular application. They intended to restart the app pool, but asked if I wanted to check anything first.
Read on to see what Josh did to troubleshoot and then correct the issue.
Comments closedMichael Bourgon tries out Mermaid:
Just found out about this the past month.
I like diagrams for my documentation, and I detest making it. I also would like to build it via script, since that’s more useful.
I used Mermaid to create a series of architectural diagrams a couple years back. It was a reasonably good experience, although you have to keep in mind that you don’t get pixel-perfect designs and certain concepts can be difficult to represent. Even so, it’s quite alright for straightforward diagrams and includes support for icon sets for a variety of cloud and on-premises environments.
Comments closedTom Martens builds a solution:
No matter what, when the on-premises gateways are not working as expected, data will not refresh, and direct query queries will not succeed. For this reason, I consider it a good idea to track the well-being of these valuable resources. This article describes a solution built with Microsoft Fabric. It’s not necessary to use Fabric, and it’s also not necessary to build a solution on your own. If you want to track the well-being of your on-premises data gateways but do not want to build something, I recommend using the solution by Rui Romano you can find here: https://github.com/RuiRomano/pbigtwmonitor
I built this monitoring solution focusing on the well-being of the on-premises data gateway. I might extend this solution in the future, but for now, it’s about the availability of the on-premises data gateway and the data gateway connections. Availability and analysis will follow during the next weeks.
Click through for Tom’s solution.
Comments closedTeo Lachev doesn’t like general programming languages for ETL and ELT operations:
Someone asked the other day for my opinion about the open-source dbt tool for ETL. I hadn’t heard about it. Next thing I’ve noticed was that Fabric Warehouse added support for it, so I got inspired to take a first look. Seems like an ELT-oriented tool. Good, I’m a big fan of the ELT pattern whose virtues I extolled I discussed many times here. But a Python-based tool that requires writing custom code for orchestration in a dev environment, such as Visual Studio Code? Yuck!
My reasoning is simple: complexity. Bespoke ETL/ELT tools like SQL Server Information Services, Informatica, Azure Data Factory, Airflow, and the like are good when you fit into their primary use cases: moving data from a few data sources into a destination, perhaps with some level of transformation in between.
But here are areas off the top of my head where I’ve seen these tools not work well: