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Category: Wacky Ideas

Drawing SSIS Packages as SVGs

Published 2019-07-16 by Kevin Feasel

Bartosz Ratajczyk continues a series on taking SSIS packages and generating SVGs from their control flows:

To make things harder, the layout of the sequences and tasks is not some nested XML structure. All of the elements have the same parent – <GraphLayout>, meaning all of them are at the same tree level. Also – there is no attribute showing where a particular object belongs. Almost. In the example with the sequences, I see two regularities:
– the outer container is placed later in the XML, than the inner container
– the @Id attributes show the nesting of the objects

I’m not sure how often I’d use this in practice, but if you want to understand some of the internals of SSIS, this is an interesting series to follow.

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Chaos Engineering and KubeInvaders

Published 2019-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski wants to play a game:

KubeInvaders allows you to play Space Invaders in order to kill pods in Kubernetes and watch new pods be created (this actually might be my favourite github repo of all time).

I demo SQL Server running in Kubernetes a lot so really wanted to get this working in my Azure Kubernetes Service cluster. Here’s how you get this up and running.

I got to see Andrew show it off at SQL Saturday Cork and it was as fun as you’d expect.

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The SSMS Magic 8 Ball

Published 2019-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Bert Wagner has fun with SSMS:

As a kid, I found Magic 8 Balls alluring. There is something appealing about a who-knows-how-many-sides die emerging from the depths of a mysterious inky blue fluid to help answers life’s most difficult questions.

I never ended up buying a magic eight ball of my own though, so today I’m going to build and animate one in SQL Server Management Studio.

Now you can finally answer those important life questions without leaving Management Studio.

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SQL Server Numerology

Published 2019-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Denis Gobo has some fun with SQL Server numbers of importance:

I was troubleshooting a deadlock the other day and it got me thinking…. I know the number 1205 by heart and know it is associated to a deadlock.  What other numbers are there that you can associate to an event or object or limitation. For example 32767 will be known by a lot of people as the database id of the ResourceDb, master is 1, msdb is 4 etc etc.

So below is a list of numbers I thought of

Leave me a comment with any numbers that you know by heart

BTW I didn’t do the limits for int, smallint etc etc, those are the same in all programming languages…so not unique to SQL Server

Read on for Denis’s list.

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Fun with Emoji in SSMS

Published 2019-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky shares a method to generate any Unicode character in SQL Server Management Studio:

I used to go to the Emoticons (Emoji) 1F600—1F64F page of unicode-table.com to copy and paste characters, code points, or check the encoding chart at the bottom of each character page (the “hex” column of both “UTF-16BE” and “UTF-16LE” rows have proven most useful).
But not anymore. Now, I just hit:   Ctrl + 0.

When I do that, I get a list of 188,657 code points. Each row contains the official code point value (“U+HHHH”), the integer value, the hex value (“0xHHHH”), the character itself, the UTF-16 Little Endian byte sequence (how it is actually stored, and what you get if you convert an NVARCHAR value to VARBINARY), the surrogate pair values, the T-SQL notation (which does not require using an _SC or _140_ collation), the HTML notation (“&#xHHHH;”), and finally the C-style notation (“\xHHHH” ; used for C / C++ / C# / Java / etc). I can copy and paste any of those values and use them in queries, emails, blog posts, .NET code, and so on.

Click through to see how Solomon does this.

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Bad Idea Files: Cross-Server Temp Table Access

Published 2019-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Fisher explains how to shoot yourself in the foot:

So a few things here. I’m using a global temp table instead of a local one because it makes it easier to reference. Local temp tables aren’t listed in tempdb under their name while global ones are.

The first part of this message (the bit in black) is a warning basically telling us that if there is a temp table (a # at the front of the name) it’s going to ignore the multi part reference. In other words, you’re going to get this message any time you try to use a multi part name and a temp table. Linked server or not. The second part of the message (the bit in red) just tells us that there isn’t a temp table named ##DBList.

Kenneth finds a way, but I can’t think of a scenario where accessing a temp table on a different instance turned out to be a good idea.

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Finding Singleton Tables

Published 2019-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Michael J. Swart wants to help you find single tables in your area:

What’s achievable? I want to identify tables to extract from the database that won’t take years. Large monolithic systems can have a lot of dependencies to unravel.

So what tables in the database have the least dependencies? How do I tell without a trustworthy data model? Is it the ones with the fewest foreign keys (in or out)? Maybe, but foreign keys aren’t always defined properly or they can be missing all together.

My thought is that if two tables are joined together in some query, then they’re related or connected in some fashion. So that’s my idea. I can look at the procedure cache of a database in production to see where the connections are. And when I know that, I can figure out what tables are not connected.

Click through for the script to help you do it.

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Preventing SQL Server Startup With A Simple INI File

Published 2019-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky is a month early with this:

In the event shown directly above, towards the bottom, in the final “<Data>” element that starts with “\\?\C:\ProgramData...“, that entry does point to a folder containing a Report.wer file. It is a plain text containing a bunch of error dump info, but nothing that would seem to indicate where to even start looking to fix this. And, nothing useful for searching on, at least not as far as my searching around revealed.

Conclusion
There you have it: a nearly untraceable way to prevent SQL Server from starting.

Read on to see how what Solomon did.

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Formatting with RegEx in SQL Server

Published 2019-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill has a problem:

This is a contrived example but I was given a script that got the “Discipline”, “DocumentVersion”, “DocumentNumber”, “SectionNumber”, and “SectionName” out of the above.

And while it works, I hate that formatting. Everything is all squashed and shoved together.

No, thanks. Let’s see if we can make this more presentable.

Shane has a regular expression. Now Shane has two problems.

In all seriousness, regular expressions are extremely powerful in the right scenario. Shane mentions being okay with it not in the database engine and I’m usually alright with that, but there are cases when it’s really helpful like figuring out if a particular input is valid. One example I have on a project is finding legitimate codes (like ISBN) where you can solve the problem easily with a regex but my source data is abysmal. I can use the SQL# regular expression functions to drop into CLR and figure out whether that value is any good, something I would have a lot more trouble with in T-SQL alone.

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