A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
It’s been a busy few months working on scripts in my GitHub repo, including adding two new members to the family.
- sp_IndexCleanup: Easily deduplicate indexes — scripts all the changes out for you!
- sp_PerfCheck: A high-level review of performance-related settings and configurations!
Read on to see which other scripts have updates and where you can download all of Erik’s scripts.
Comments closedHans-Jürgen Schönig combines two features:
Regular expressions and PostgreSQL have been a great team for many many years. The same is true for PostgreSQL arrays, which have been around for a long time as well. However, what people rarely do is combine those two technologies into something more powerful that can be used for various purposes.
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedSunitha Muthukrishna takes us through a debugging exercise:
Debugging your code is important to identify issues and mitigate them when you’re working with user data functions in Microsoft Fabric. You want to make sure everything works as it should and that’s where local debugging lets you catch problems in your code without messing with the live environment. In this blog post, I will walk you through the steps to make local debugging easier and faster.
Click through to see what you’ll need, as well as the process to debug a function locally.
Comments closedRob Douglas will reboot many things, but not the database server:
I am taking a slightly different tangent. My problem is neither strange or unique – in fact it’s infuriatingly common and it stems from one of the most common troubleshooting techniques in IT. While asking users “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” is a common go to for tech support call handlers, it is not a great idea when the “it” you are talking about is a database server
Click through for a cautionary tale, as well as an explanation of why this usually isn’t the smart play.
Comments closedI have a proper blog post coming out tomorrow for T-SQL Tuesday, but today, celebrate with me that SSMS 21 finally, at long last, fixes the irritating fact that the New Session window in SSMS for Extended Events always opened to the wrong size.
Click through for an example of the bug and how SSMS 21 fixes things. This type of bug is particularly pernicious because there aren’t scroll bars or any sort of indicator that some additional functionality exists, so unless you know that it’s there, you won’t know to look for it.
Comments closedIvan Palomares Carrascosa isn’t just using the median:
Missing values appear more often than not in many real-world datasets. There can be instances with missing values in one or several of their attributes for various reasons, such as human error, corrupted data, or incomplete data collection processes, e.g. from surveys with optional fields. While there exist basic strategies to deal with instances or attributes containing missing values, — like removing rows or columns entirely, or imputing missing values with a default value (typically the mean or median of the attribute) — these strategies are sometimes not sufficient.
This article presents some advanced strategies to handle missing data, namely, imputation techniques made possible through a combined use of Pandas and Scikit-learn libraries in Python.
Click through for three such techniques, including an example of how to use the technique and under which circumstances to avoid that technique.
Comments closedVlad Drumea checks server settings:
It’s not uncommon that I run into a VM that’s configured with something like 6 or more cores with each core on one socket.
Here’s an example how this would show up in Task Manager for a VM with 16 CPU cores configured with 1 core per socket.
Read on to learn why this particular configuration can turn out so poorly with SQL Server, particularly when you use Standard Edition.
Comments closedJon Russell covers a quiet feature:
A checkpoint is a background process that writes dirty pages to disk. A checkpoint performs a full scan of the pages in the buffer pool, lists all the dirty pages that are yet to be written to disk, and finally writes those pages to disk. In SQL instances that do not have many dirty pages in the buffer pool, this is a trivial operation. However, with SQL instances that have OLTP databases, use more memory and/or involve sequential scanning of all pages, the performance of the system could be impacted.
With SQL Server 2012, indirect checkpoints were introduced. In this case, the dirty page manager manages the dirty page list and keeps track of all the dirty page modifiers of the database. By default, it runs every 60 seconds and tracks the dirty pages that need to be flushed.
Read on to learn more about why indirect checkpointing exists, the kinds of capabilities it offers, and the extent to which you might want to tweak its settings.
Comments closedIf you’ve encountered a situation where none of your SQL Server Always On Availability Group (AG) replicas become PRIMARY after a cluster failure — you’re not alone. We recently had a customer with this exact scenario (AG won’t become primary after force quorum), and it is both uncommon and difficult to troubleshoot so I thought it would be worth posting about.
Click through for the scenario, what’s happening, and how to resolve this.
Comments closedI’ve been using it for about a month now, and I have been favorably impressed. It’s a lot better user experience than PGAdmin, has some additional features—like being able to easily export query results. Much like some of the other Azure Data solutions—you can also connect with Entra ID and navigate to your Azure resources. Beyond the basics—you can also use Copilot to chat with your database.
Click through for a demonstration of the extension.
Comments closed