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Curated SQL Posts

Changing Query Store Report Interval

Published 2019-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal wants to change the report interval for a Query Store report:

While not specific to SQL Server 2019 (I was using this version to do some testing) I was struggling to find how to change the time period of analysis for the Query Store reports within SSMS.

This is not a ground breaking post but hopefully a helpful one! So, I load up the “Top 25 resource consumers” report and by default it will show data for the past hour. So what do you do, or should I say what do you click to change the time interval for the report?

Read on for the two screenshots which answer this question for you.

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T-SQL Tuesday 116 Roundup

Published 2019-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, on the topic of SQL Server on Linux:

I noticed a common theme in how easy it is to install SQL on Linux that tells me if you didn’t think you had time to install SQL on Linux then you probably do and should give a try in the near future.

Thanks for all that participated!

Let me put it this way: one of my employees, who had never really worked with SQL Server before, got SQL Server on Linux installed through Docker in about 15 minutes. It’s really easy to do.

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Power Query FILTER()

Published 2019-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Collie takes us through a good use of FILTER() in DAX:

The thing both of those formulas have in common is that they are using a measure in the filter argument of the CALCULATE function.  In both examples here, I’ve highlighted the offending measure in yellow.

CALCULATE([Sightings per Year], [Avg Sighting Length in Mins]>6)

CALCULATE([Sightings per Year],
Observations[TTL Min]>[Avg Sighting Length in Mins])

In the first formula, I was trying to use a measure on the left side of the comparison, and in the second, I was trying to use a measure on the right side of the comparison.  Both are illegal.

Read on to see why and how you can use FILTER() to solve these problems.

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Chart Confusion with Labels

Published 2019-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Cisneros shows us an example where unexpected label values can throw off your readers:

The internet immediately latched onto the seemingly absurd collection of months portrayed in this chart. The bill, dating from June of 2019, included 13 prior months of usage from as early as August of 2016, as recently as March of 2019, and in a random order.

Soon, our non-U.S.-based friends pointed out that the dates made even less sense to them, as (of course) their convention is not to show dates in MM/YY format, but in YY/MM format.

And with this, the truth of the matter became obvious: the dates were in neither MM/YY format nor YY/MM format; they were in MM/DD format, and excluded labeling the year entirely. 

Even small things can make a difference in your ability to get the message across to users.

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SnowflakeDB: A Review

Published 2019-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Achilleus gives us an overview of SnowflakeDB:

There is no dark magic involved in improving the efficiency of your queries. Based on whom you ask this can be considered as a standout feature or a major hindrance but I am not a fan of tuning queries according to my workload as I feel the way data evolves so quickly in organizations. It becomes more tricky to play catch up to turn the all necessary knobs to make the query faster.

Snowflake claims they tune all the queries “automagically” via a dynamic query optimization engine. No need for any indexes, updating statistics, partition keys or pre-shard data for even distribution when you scale up. All of this will be done by their patent-pending dynamic optimization.

But I still feel snowflake can work on providing the necessary knobs for people who would like to tune their queries.

Read the whole thing. In short, it’s a technology worth looking at, but it’s not going to work perfectly in all cases.

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Determining Your OS in Powershell

Published 2019-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer shows how you can determine your operating system in Powershell Core 6 and Powershell 7:

Recently, I discovered three PowerShell Core variables that could be very helpful when it comes to determining the operating system in PowerShell. PowerShell has become a cross-platfrom tool and can be installed on Linux or MacOs, too. So it could happen that you have to determine the operating system first before starting any other actions.

Click through to see what they are and how to use them.

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Hooking SQL Server to Kafka

Published 2019-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Niels Berglund has an interesting scenario for us:

We see how the procedure in Code Snippet 2 takes relevant gameplay details and inserts them into the dbo.tb_GamePlay table.

In our scenario, we want to stream the individual gameplay events, but we cannot alter the services which generate the gameplay. We instead decide to generate the event from the database using, as we mentioned above, the SQL Server Extensibility Framework.

Click through for the scenario in depth and how to use Java to tie together SQL Server and Kafka.

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Oracle Data Guard on Azure

Published 2019-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman’s worlds continue to collide:

So, as most people know, I’m not a big fan of Oracle RAC, (Real Application Cluster).  My opinion was that it was often sold for use cases that it doesn’t serve, (such as HA) and the resource demands between the nodes, as well as what happens when a node is evicted to those that are left are not in the best interest for most use cases.  On the other hand, I LOVE Oracle Data Guard, active or standard, don’t matter, the product is great and it’s an awesome option for those migrating their Oracle databases to Azure VMs.

Read on to see what Oracle Data Guard is and where you might use it.

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Refreshing Views After DDL Changes

Published 2019-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Eduardo Pivaral shows how you can refresh the metadata for a view in SQL Server after one of its underlying tables or functions changes:

So we proceed to execute an alter view over the first view:

ALTER VIEW dbo.[vi_invoices_received_by]
AS
SELECT
ConfirmedReceivedBy as [Received by],
COUNT(InvoiceID) as [# of Invoices],
CustomerID
FROM Sales.Invoices
GROUP BY ConfirmedReceivedBy, CustomerID;
GO

So we should now be able to see the updated column names on the second view, right? 

but if you execute the view again, you will obtain the same results as before:

Read on to see what’s gone wrong and how you can fix it.

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AMD and Server CPUs

Published 2019-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Glenn Berry has an interesting post on why he’s seriously considering recommending AMD CPUs to people:

AMD claims a 15% Instructions Per Clock (IPC) increase between the desktop Zen+ and Zen 2 generations, and we are likely to see a similar increase between the previous AMD EPYC 7001 “Naples” and the AMD EPYC 7002 series processors.

So far, we don’t know the official base and turbo clock speeds, but there was a recent leak of partial specifications and pricing by a European retailer that listed max boost clock speeds of up to 3.4 GHz. We won’t know the actual single-threaded performance of these processors until they have been released and benchmarked by neutral third-party testers. I am optimistic that they will have higher single-threaded CPU performance than Intel Cascade Lake-SP processors.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for AMD, so I’d love to see them come through with a serious competitor to Intel in the server space, for nostalgic reasons but also to make price more competitive and to make Intel get back on its game.

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