Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Tools

Analyzing Postgres Logs with pgbadger

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nowocien takes us through a useful tool:

This week, #PGSQLPhriday is hosted by Alicja Kucharczyk. Every month, one community member proposes a new subject to this monthly blogging event and let the world (or your family/friends/neighbors if you prefer) know all about pgBadger. It’s a tool to analyze your PostgreSQL logs and present you a nice web report.

If you like some history, it has been developed by Gilles Darold since more than 11 years, as v1.0 came along on June the 10th in 2012. At this time, pgfouine was the main log analyzer and the complete Perl rewrite was greatly performance influenced. In V4, it started to have its current look, by embarking the Bootstrap library and fonts.

Click through to see what pgbadger does and an example of how it makes log analysis understandable.

Comments closed

Deploying a SQL Server Container via go-sqlcmd

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jes Schultz builds a container:

In the past, you may have downloaded and installed SQL Server Developer Edition on your computer to test features, write queries, and have a sandbox. Do you want a more lightweight development environment that’s quicker to install and use? Enter Docker or Podman, sqlcmd, and SQL Server containers. 

Our modern sqlcmd gives you the capability to query your existing SQL Server and Azure SQL Database instances. It also introduces new features such as creating containers in one line of code, using an existing backup file to restore a database when the instance is created, and opening Azure Data Studio for data exploration in one command. Here is how you can do this end-to-end. 

Click through for the demo.

Comments closed

Finding Memory Grant Details in sp_WhoIsActive

Published 2023-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a video for us. There’s no graf that I can include here, so I’m stuck having to come up with my own explanation…

This is an interesting video covering a fairly new feature in sp_WhoIsActive, as well as giving us some good information around the numbers meaning pages rather than (something)bytes, yet the memory_info column gives us results in kilobytes.

Also, be sure to grab version 12 of WhoIsActive.

Comments closed

Power BI Theme Generator Updates

Published 2023-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

Seth Bauer has some updates for us:

Gradients add depth and visual interest to your reports and dashboards. With our enhanced gradient selections, you can now choose from a wide array of gradient styles to create eye-catching visualizations. Whether you prefer subtle transitions or bold color shifts, the Power BI Tips Theme Generator has you covered. Unleash your creativity and elevate your designs with stunning gradient effects.

Not all of the updates are in the free plan, though some of them are.

Comments closed

The Basics of Azure Chaos Studio

Published 2023-06-09 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal gives us an overview:

Chaos engineering is fun but especially important when building solutions in the cloud. It is great leveraging the cloud to build something, whether that’s a globally distributed website with lots of traffic or an internal 3 tier application for a business – the question is – what happens is there is an unexpected fault / disruption? Can your system / app withstand the issue?

Click through for the overview, as well as some additional resources you can use to try it out.

Comments closed

Updates to SqlPackage and DacFx

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa has an update for us:

As the primary command-line interface to DacFx, SqlPackage often benefits from dependency changes in DacFx, including the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient driver. In SqlPackage 162.0.52, the SqlClient driver has been updated from v5.0.1 to v5.1.0, bringing support for TLS1.3 encrypted connections to the .NET Core builds of SqlPackage and the ServerCertificate connection string setting for validation of SQL Server’s TLS/SSL certificate. 

Many of the fixes in this release were triaged out of issues submitted on the DacFx GitHub repository and are visible in the release milestone.  The full list of SqlPackage fixes from the release, including eight deployment-related fixes, are also listed in the SqlPackage release notes. To improve our ability to service and enhance SqlPackage, SqlPackage now collects usage data, including anonymous feature usage and diagnostic data. For more information, see the documentation section on Usage data collection.

Read on for the full set of changes.

Comments closed

Quick Tips for SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting

Published 2023-05-17 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen has a two-parter for us. Part 1 covers useful tools for performance troubleshooters:

When you’ve got the symptoms of a database issue you can run a series of diagnostic queries to try and drill down on the problem and then start figuring out solutions. There are a number of free tools out there though that can speed up that process immensely. In this post we’re going to look at my favourites.

Part 2 takes us through the mechanics of measuring query performance:

Attendees have come up with a range of answers from “With a stopwatch” (which I like a lot) to the slightly more technical “Using Profiler”. I like the first answer just because that’s where we all start. We run something from an application and we literally time how long it takes, or we run something in SSMS and we use the counter near the bottom right of our query window to tell us how long it took. We may even run something 100 times in a loop and capture the overall time so we can take an average.

Incidentally, if you are using SET STATISTICS IO ON and are sick of the way it writes out results, Richie Rump’s Statistics Parser tool is great for converting the blob of text into something humans can easily parse.

Comments closed

Version Control for Power BI Datasets

Published 2023-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank improves on a prior version control system:

In the previous post, I outlined a possible workflow for Power BI development, and implemented an Azure DevOps pipeline to show how steps in such a workflow could be automated. To build the pipeline I stored an entire .pbix report file – data and all – in version control, which is a problem for at least two reasons:

  • storing large report files in a version control system won’t scale well
  • datasets may contain confidential or sensitive data which must be kept out of version control.

In this post I’ll look at separating a report’s dataset from its visuals, version controlling the standalone dataset (without data), and deploying the dataset automatically to Power BI.

Read on for the process.

Comments closed

ScriptDOM Now Open Source

Published 2023-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa has great news for us:

ScriptDOM is a powerful .NET library for code parsing, generating an abstract syntax tree (AST) that can be leveraged to apply code formatting, detect antipatterns, and more. We are thrilled to announce that the source code for ScriptDOM has been released into open source under the MIT license and is available on GitHub.  In addition, ScriptDOM is now distributed by Microsoft as a standalone NuGet package.

This is big and good news. We’ve been able to use ScriptDOM for quite a while, but now that we can extend and improve the library, that’s great.

Comments closed