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Category: Versions

The Tuple Mover in SQL Server 2019

Published 2020-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Taryn Pratt gives us closure on an issue from a few months back:

I suggest reading my other post first, it’ll only take a few minutes. I’ll wait…

However, if you really don’t want to read it, here’s a quick recap on the initial issue.

In early February 2020, a lot of data was deleted from some clustered columnstore indexes in our PRIZM database. Some of the tables were rebuilt, but 11 tables weren’t since we don’t have maintenance windows, and that would involve downtime. The rebuilds would happen once we upgraded to SQL Server 2019, to take advantage of the ability to rebuild those columnstore indexes online.

Taryn now has the full story and I recommend giving it a read.

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Apache Flink 1.1.0 Released

Published 2020-07-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marta Paes announces Apache Flink version 1.11:

Change Data Capture (CDC) has become a popular pattern to capture committed changes from a database and propagate those changes to downstream consumers, for example to keep multiple datastores in sync and avoid common pitfalls such as dual writes. Being able to easily ingest and interpret these changelogs into the Table API/SQL has been a highly demanded feature in the Flink community — and it’s now possible with Flink 1.11.

Click through for the full list of updates.

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Using Specific R Package Versions in Docker Images

Published 2020-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Roman Lustrik shares how to fix package versions in Docker images:

Using package in R is easy. You install from CRAN using install.packages("packagename"), it resolves dependencies and you’re good to go. What R natively doesn’t handle so well is installing a particular package version without jumping through hoops. Technically you need the source file of the package version you want to install AND all source files of the dependencies (in the correct version, of course). This has been made almost seamless with packages packrat and recently, renv.

This comes handy when you are constructing a Docker file to run in production. Usually you want to run this defensively and do not want things to change from one image build to another. To get there, you can save all your package names and version into a file (renv.lock) and use that to reconstruct the now defined package structure with predictable versions (see renv vignette here).

This is quite useful as R package developers tend not to covet backwards compatibility, and one of the key benefits of containers is to have the option to keep the same code base and configuration in all environments.

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SQL Server 2019 CU5

Published 2020-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2019 CU5:

This article describes Cumulative Update package 5 (CU5) for SQL Server 2019. This update contains fixes that were released after the initial release of SQL Server 2019 and updates the SQL Server and Analysis services components to the following builds.

I see a half-dozen or so PolyBase-related fixes, though I was hoping to read that they’ve fixed the issue around creating and using external objects when you are connected to SQL Server via Windows authentication. I’ll have to test that out to see if it was fixed—that was broken in CU3 and remained so in CU4.

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Azure Data Studio June 2020 Release

Published 2020-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces a new release of Azure Data Studio:

The Data Virtualization extension for Azure Data Studio is now updated with more functionality and a new logo. This update allows you to use the data virtualization wizard to virtualize MongoDB and Teradata data sources into your SQL Server. This new functionality is available for SQL Server 2019 instances running CU5 or later.

To install the extension, search for Data Virtualization in the extension viewlet in Azure Data Studio and click install.

Of course I’m going to clip the bit about PolyBase.

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Merge Replication: Subscriber and Publisher Versions

Published 2020-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Stedman gives us the proper order for upgrading SQL Server when you’re using merge replication:

Working on a recent SQL Server merge replication project we needed to update some of the servers in a merge replication scenario without upgrading all of them. Consider a merge replication setup with a publisher, a distributor and 2 or more subscribers all on the same version of SQL Server, and you need to upgrade the SQL Server version on the subscriber to a newer version like SQL Server 2019.

Before doing any type of upgrade, I wanted to confirm that things would or would not work. First checking some Microsoft documentation it appears that replication from a SQL 2012, SQL 2014, SQL 2016, or any older version of a publisher is not supported to a subscriber running on SQL Server 2019. Or more specifically the subscriber needs to be on the same ore older version than the publisher.

Read on for a demo, as well as an interesting caveat.

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May 2020 Release of Azure Data Studio

Published 2020-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu has some goodies for us:

The key highlights to cover this month include:

– Announcing Redgate SQL Prompt extension
– Announcing the new machine learning extension
– Added new Python dependencies wizard
– Added support for parameterization for Always Encrypted
– Improvements to the notebook markdown toolbar
– Bug fixes

For a list of complete updates, refer to the Azure Data Studio release notes.

I’ll have to check out the ML extension.

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Don’t Install Hadoop on Windows

Published 2020-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Hadi speaks truth:

A few days ago, I published the installation guides for Hadoop, Hive, and Pig on Windows 10. And yesterday, I finished installing and configuring the ecosystem. The only consequence I have is that “Think 1000 times before installing Hadoop and related technologies on Windows!”.

The biggest problem is that Microsoft got flaky about this. Back in 2012-2013, they backed running Hadoop on Windows as part of getting HDInsight up and running. I even remember the HDInsight emulator which could run on a local desktop. By 2014 or so, they shifted directions and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Because Apache Spark (which does have pretty decent Windows support, at least for development) really wants Hive, you can fake it with winutils.

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Availability Group Offerings in Standard Edition

Published 2020-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Guy Glantser notes an issue with Availability Group documentation:

In SQL Server 2017 Microsoft added a new flavor called Read-Scale Availability Groups. This is different, because the goal here is not high availability or disaster recovery, but rather read-scalability. As opposed to the other flavors, in RSAG there is no cluster, and there is also no automatic failover mechanism. But you can set up multiple secondary replicas with read-only access and load balancing, and offload read workloads from the primary replica. This is a great scalability feature, and you can read more about it here.

Now, if you check Microsoft documentation regarding the editions and supported features of SQL Server, you will be happy to see that RSAG is supported in Standard Edition. I was happy to see it too. Unfortunately, if you try to set up a Read-Scale Availability Group on Standard Edition, it will not work. You will only be able to create a Basic Availability Group, as discussed earlier.

Click through for the answer, as well as what you can do in Standard Edition.

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