A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Alan Yu announces the February 2021 release of Azure Data Studio:
The key highlights to cover this month include:
– Added new notebook improvements
– Added improvements to Azure Arc extension.
– New extension updates.
– Bug Fixes.For a list of complete updates, refer to the Azure Data Studio release notes.
Click through for details on each of these.
Leave a CommentJeffrey Hicks gives us an update on the Powershell landscape:
The PowerShell community is beginning another year in the world of PowerShell 7. Most of you know what that means. However, there are newcomers to our community practically every day. Or I know there are occasional or reluctant users who might not pay enough attention to understand the world of PowerShell as it stands today. I wrote this post as a kind of virtual sticky note for the PowerShell community. Feel free to reference this post in your own work so that you don’t have to explain or define “Windows PowerShell” and “PowerShell”.
Click through to learn how to differentiate the two.
Comments closedRandolph West takes a look at a patch:
Microsoft announced updates today for all supported versions of SQL Server, for a privilege escalation vulnerability that leverages Extended Events. For security reasons no further details have been provided, but you can expect more information in the near future, now that this update is public.
Be sure to grab the latest update for your version of SQL Server.
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 closedMarta Paes and Aljoscha Krettek announce a new release of Apache Flink:
– The community has added support for efficient batch execution in the DataStream API. This is the next major milestone towards achieving a truly unified runtime for both batch and stream processing.
– Kubernetes-based High Availability (HA) was implemented as an alternative to ZooKeeper for highly available production setups.
– The Kafka SQL connector has been extended to work in upsert mode, supported by the ability to handle connector metadata in SQL DDL. Temporal table joins can now also be fully expressed in SQL, no longer depending on the Table API.
– Support for the DataStream API in PyFlink expands its usage to more complex scenarios that require fine-grained control over state and time, and it’s now possible to deploy PyFlink jobs natively on Kubernetes.
Read on for more details on these as well as other changes.
Comments closedBrent Ozar has a breakdown of SQL Server adoption by version:
Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the summer 2020 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.
Out of the 3,650 servers sending in data recently, the most popular version of SQL Server is still 2016.
It’s an interesting survey, but it’s important to remember with any survey what the biases are before drawing conclusions on the general population of all SQL Server instances. This is among ConstantCare users, so if I had a hunch about them, I’d say they’re going to blow out the middle versus gen pop—in other words, I’d expect 2019 and 2017 usage to be a bit higher across the world (and not just among ConstantCare users), but also 2005 (not pictured), 2008, and 2008 R2 to be higher. My hunch here is that the former are shops which have their act together and figure that they don’t need ConstantCare, and the latter are all of those “hidden” instances of SQL Server acting as the back end for small business websites and the like, where nobody even thinks about having a database administrator, much less paying for tooling. Nonetheless, these are interesting trends and even if I think the general population might look different, my data-less guess is that these numbers look reasonable.
Comments closedAlan Yu announces the November 2020 release of Azure Data Studio:
Another feature request was to provide support for parameters in a notebook. Parameterization is the ability to execute the same notebook with different parameters.
With this release of Azure Data Studio, users will now be able to utilize Papermill’s ability to parameterize, execute, and store notebooks. By stating the parameters cell as the first code cell in your notebook, it ensures that the injected parameters in the outputted parameterized notebook will be placed directly after the original parameters cell. That way the parameterized notebook will utilize the newly injected parameters instead of the original parameters cell.
Users can utilize Papermill CLI as well as the Python API to pass in a new set of parameters quickly and efficiently as shown below.
That does look interesting.
Comments closedMax Trinidad has a public service announcement for us:
Have you installed any of the .NET Tools? Such as “.NET Interactive” and “PowerShell Global“, then you’ll need to remember, to update these tools manually.
These tools give you the ability to use create Jupyter Notebook using Python Kernel but also with C#, F#, and PowerShell 7 kernels.
Read on to see how to check if you need to update either of these.
Comments closedSreekanth Bandarla wants to roll back cumulative updates on Linux:
Of course you can get this info from SQL or several other ways in Linux. Okay, now we know we got SQL Server 2019 CU5 running on this server to work with. Let’s just assume CU5 broke something in my database and I want to go back to CU4. How do I do that?
Click through to see how to do this for Red Hat (or any system using yum). Debian-based don’t have a downgrade option, but you can use apt-get install mssql-server=[version number] instead.
Andy Levy combines dbatools and KBUpdate:
Another of Chrissy LeMaire’s (blog | twitter) projects is
KBUpdate. Compared todbatoolsit’s a pretty compact module, but it’s incredibly useful – it’ll seek out information about KB updates and even download them for you! She’s also rolled these functions intodbatoolsfor convenience, so we don’t need to install or import that module separately.
Read on to see how Andy ties it all together.
Comments closed