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Category: Versions

Comparing System Metadata Between SQL Server Versions

Published 2018-07-13 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand shows how he finds hidden features in new SQL Server builds:

One of the areas I like to focus on is new features in SQL Server. Under both MVP and Microsoft Partner programs, I get to see a lot of builds of SQL Server that don’t make it to the public, and documentation for these builds is typically sparse. In order to get a head start on testing things out, I often need to explore on my own. And so I wrote some scripts for that, which I’ve talked about in previous blog posts:

When I install a new version of SQL Server (be it a cumulative update, the final service pack for a major version, or the first CTP of vNext), there are two steps:

  1. Create a linked server to the build that came before it

  2. Create local synonyms referencing the important catalog views in the linked server

It’s a good way to get a glimpse at which features devs are currently working on but haven’t enabled yet.

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Biml 2018 Release Day

Published 2018-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard has a bunch of new presents to unwrap:

Varigence keeps giving away cool stuff! Nowhere is Varigence’s commitment to community more evident than in the feature list for BimlExpress 2018. The previous version – BimlExpress 2017 – included the Preview Pane. BimlExpress 2018 includes the ability to Convert SSIS Packages to Biml:

How cool is that? And it’s in the free (FREE!) version!

As with BimlFlex and BimlStudio, there are too many cool features to list here. Head over to the BimlExpress 2018 feature page to learn more.

Converting existing packages to Biml was a great feature that I could never afford.  It’s exceedingly nice of Scott Currie & crew to make that available in the free product.

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Power BI Helper Version 2.0 Released

Published 2018-06-21 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad has a new version of Power BI Helper:

I started Power BI Helper with the intention to help to find issues in Power BI reports faster and easier. This tool over time became better and better. I’m excited now to let you know that the version 2.0 of this product is now available for everyone to use and enjoy. This version comes with these features:

  • Connecting to more than one Power BI model. Selection option for the model.

  • Showing the connection mode of the Power BI file.

  • Showing list of tables that are NOT used in any visualization, and can be hidden from the report.

  • Modeling advises

    • List of both directional relationships
    • List of inactive relationships

  • Some minor bug fixes

It looks like quite the useful tool.

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HDP 3.0 Released

Published 2018-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Roni Fontaine and Saumitra Buragohain announce Hortonworks Data Platform version 3.0:

Other additional capabilities include:

  • Scalability and availability with NameNode federation, allowing customers to scale to thousands of nodes and a billion files. Higher availability with multiple name nodes and standby capabilities allow for the undisrupted, continuous cluster operations if a namenode goes down.

  • Lower total cost of ownership with erasure coding, providing a data protection method that up to this point has mostly been found in object stores. Hadoop 3 will no longer default to storing three full copies of each piece of data across its clusters. Instead of that 3x hit on storage, the erasure encoding method in Hadoop 3 will incur an overhead of 1.5x while maintaining the same level of data recoverability from disk failure. The end result will be a 50% savings in storage overhead, reducing it by half.

  • Real-time database, delivering improved query optimization to process more data at a faster rate by eliminating the performance gap between low-latency and high-throughput workloads. Enabled via Apache Hive 3.0, HDP 3.0 offers the only unified SQL solution that can seamlessly combine real-time & historical data, making both available for deep SQL analytics. New features such as                workload management enable fine grained resource allocation so no need to worry about resource competition. Materialized views pre-computes and caches the intermediate tables into views where the query optimizer will automatically leverage the pre-computed cache, drastically improve performance. The end result is faster time to insights.

  • Data science performance improvements around Apache Spark and Apache Hive integration. HDP 3.0 provides seamless Spark integration to the cloud. And containerized TensorFlow technical preview combined with GPU pooling delivers a deep learning framework that makes deep learning faster and easier.

Looks like it’s invite-only at the moment, but that should change pretty soon.  It also looks like I’ve got a new weekend project…

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Inside SQL Server 6.5

Published 2018-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar reviews a blast from the past:

I picked up half a dozen used books about SQL Server 6.5, then spent a delightful weekend reading them. Seriously delightful – lemme tell you just how into it I was. Erika and I eat all weekend meals out at restaurants, but she saw me so happily curled up in my chair reading that she insisted on going out and getting tacos for us just so I wouldn’t have to get up. I was having that good of a time READING BOOKS ABOUT SQL SERVER 6.5. (Also, Erika is amazing. Moving on.)

To bring you that same fun, I wanna share with you a few pages from Inside SQL Server 6.5 by Ron Soukup, one of the fathers of SQL Server

It’s a great read.  My contribution to the Old But Good oeuvre is the Handbook of Relational Database Design by Candace Fleming and Barbar von Halle.  For my money, it has what I still consider the best primer on database normalization out there.  It also has a bunch of stuff that we should be glad we don’t do anymore, like figuring out specific file layouts for non-clustered indexes to minimize the number of disk rotations needed to retrieve a record of data.

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R 3.5.0 Released

Published 2018-04-24 by Kevin Feasel

Tal Galili announces that R 3.5.0 is now available:

  • By default the (arbitrary) signs of the loadings from princomp() are chosen so the first element is non-negative.

  • If –default-packages is not used, then Rscript now checks the environment variable R_SCRIPT_DEFAULT_PACKAGES. If this is set, then it takes precedence over R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES. If default packages are not specified on the command line or by one of these environment variables, then Rscript now uses the same default packages as R. For now, the previous behavior of not including methods can be restored by setting the environment variable R_SCRIPT_LEGACY to yes.

  • When a package is found more than once, the warning from find.package(*, verbose=TRUE) lists all library locations.

  • POSIXt objects can now also be rounded or truncated to month or year.

Click through for the long, long list of changes.  H/T R-Bloggers

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Upgrading SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition

Published 2018-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jo Douglass hits an error when upgrading to SQL Server 2017 on Standard Edition:

A quick one to signal boost this issue and its solution, as I’m sure other people will run into it. If you’re on Standard Edition of SQL Server and upgrading to 2017, you might run into an issue where the database services portion of the upgrade fails. This seems to be related to SSIS.

If you experience this problem, mid-way through the upgrade you’ll receive this error in a pop-up:

Wait on the Database Engine recovery handle failed. Check the SQL Server error log for potential causes.

At the end of the upgrade, it will show that the database services section has failed. Checking the error log will show this:

Script level upgrade for database ‘master’ failed because upgrade step ‘ISServer_upgrade.sql’ encountered error 917, state 1, severity 15.

Read on for the answer and a workaround.

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Hadoop 3.1 Released

Published 2018-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Wangda Tan and Vinod Kumar Vavilapalli have a post on Hadoop 3.1.0:

This release is *not* yet ready for production use. Critical issues are being ironed out via testing and downstream adoption. Production users should wait for a 3.1.1/3.1.2 release.

The Hadoop community fixed 768 JIRAs (https://s.apache.org/apache-hadoop-3.1.0-all-tickets) in total as part of the 3.1.0 release. Of these fixes:
– 141 in Hadoop Common
– 266 in HDFS
– 329 in YARN
– 32 in MapReduce
Apache Hadoop 3.1.0 contains a number of significant features and enhancements.

YARN supporting GPUs and FPGAs is very interesting.

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Query Store And CU4

Published 2018-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato notes that if you ran SQL Server 2017 CU2 with Query Store, you want to upgrade and run a special script:

There is a Query Store fix in the latest Cumulative Updates of SQL Server 2017, and if you are keeping current with the latest cumulative updates, there’s a script you need to run if you’ve installed CU2 at any point.

First, if you are still on CU2, you might want to consider upgrading to CU4 (released February 17, 2018).

Second, if you previously had CU2 installed (and are now on CU3 or CU4), you want to make sure that you’ve run the script included with CU3 and CU4 release notes.

The script removes plans from Query Store that were captured when running CU2.

Read the whole thing and keep those servers patched.

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New SQL Server 2017 On Windows Docker Container

Published 2018-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Perry Skountrianos announces that SQL Server 2017 Developer & Express editions (running Windows Server 1709) are now available on Docker Hub:

Windows Server version 1709 brings the following important improvements that developers can take advantage of with the updated container images.

  1. First of all, the microsoft/windowsservercore image underneath SQL shrunk by more than 2GB, so the SQL Server images are also 2GB smaller.

  2. The networking support for containers was improved to support Kubernetes, now at beta in version 1.9 beta on Windows, and routing mesh with Docker Swarm.

  3. If you want to store your databases on remote storage, you can now by using global SMB mounts (New-SMBGlobalMapping) along with a docker volume (docker run -v c:\shared:c:\data microsoft/mssql-express-…).

Seems like a useful improvement.

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