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Curated SQL Posts

Getting The Current Date And Time In SQL Server

Published 2018-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West shows a few functions which can retrieve current date and time information:

What do we mean by local date and time?

As discussed previously, SQL Server is not time zone aware, nor does it have to be. This is because the operating system that SQL Server runs on can have multiple custom regional settings depending on which user is logged into the server.

This holds true for the SQL Server service account as well, which is just another user on the operating system. When any of these functions is called, it is asking for the date and time from the operating system.

If you’re going to use DATETIME2 (which you generally should), take advantage of the precision that SYSUTCDATETIME() gives you over GETUTCDATE().

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SQL Operations Studio April Release

Published 2018-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces the April release of SQL Operations Studio:

Highlights for this build include the following.

  • Public preview release of SQL Agent extension

  • Added new extensions and improved existing extensions

    • Improvements to Server Reports Extension
    • Release of SSMS Keymap extension
    • Release of AlwaysOn Insights extension
    • Release of MSSQL Instance Insights
    • Release of MSSQL Db Insights

  • Added Visual Studio Code 1.21 platform source code refresh

    • Improved large and protected file support for saving Admin protected and >256M files within SQL Ops Studio
    • Integrated Terminal splitting to work with multiple open terminals at once
    • Reduced installation on-disk file count footprint for faster installs and startup times

  • Continue to fix GitHub issues

There’s a lot in here.

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Takeaways From Implementing Power BI Embedded

Published 2018-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria has some thoughts after a proof of concept using Power BI Embedded:

After making changes and testing your report, make sure to clear any slicer values before publishing, if you have row-level security on a field shown in a slicer and you leave values selected. The selected values will be shown to users when they view the report. For example, let’s say you have created a row-level security role that can only see Product A, but you can see everything, and you left Product A and Product B selected and deployed the report. A user who views the report next and is a member of that RLS role will see the two selected values in the slicer, even though they can’t see the data for Product B on the page. This may not be a big deal for an internal report. But now imagine this is for clients. You don’t want clients to see other clients in the list. This behavior is consistent in the Power BI web service and isn’t specific to embedding. It’s just important to remember this.

There are plenty of interesting notes here, so check it out if you’re thinking of a Power BI project.

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Creating A Custom Calendar Table With Power Query

Published 2018-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Allington shows how to create a calendar table which allows users to set the start and end dates:

My approach to teaching people to use Power Query is to always use the UI where possible.  I first use the UI to do the hard work, then jump in and make small changes to the code created by the UI to meet any specific variations required.  Keep this concept in mind as you read this article.

I am going to use Power BI Desktop as the tool for this, but of course Power Query for Excel will work just as well and the process is identical.  In fact the calendar query at the end can easily be cut and pasted between Power BI and Power Query for Excel.

Check it out for another method for building calendar tables.  I tend to build them in SQL Server because that’s what I’m most familiar with, but it’s good to know a few different ways of doing this.

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Azure Data Lake Alerting

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Lara shows how to send alerts if you hit a utilization threshold:

If you want to see the step-by-step guide to create a new Log Analytics alert, check out our recent blog post on creating Log Analytics Alerts.

For the alert signal logic, use the following values:

  • Use the query from the previous step

  • Set the sum of AUs to 50 as the threshold (you can use any number that reflects your own threshold)

  • Set the trigger to 0: whenever the threshold is breached

  • Set the period and frequency for 24 hours.

Read the whole thing if you use Azure Data Lake Analytics; an unexpectedly large bill is a tough thing to swallow.

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Creating Map Plots With ggmap

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Laura Ellis shows how to use the ggmap package to create choropleth maps in R:

In the last map, it was a bit tricky to see the density of the incidents because all the graphed points were sitting on top of each other.  In this scenario, we are going to make the data all one color and we are going to set the alpha variable which will make the dots transparent.  This helps display the density of points plotted.

Also note, we can re-use the base map created in the first step “p” to plot the new map.

Check it out.  This is an introduction to creating choropleths, making it a good start.

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Running The Azure DTU Calculator On An Older Server

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jim Donahoe shows us how to get the Azure DTU calculator running on an older server without Powershell:

I recently had to do an analysis of a client’s database workload using the Azure DTU Calculator(DTU Calculator) and thought it might be interesting to share just how I did that.  I have run this tool numerous times on other clients via the PowerShell method and the Command Line method, however this client’s environment was: Windows Server 2008R2, and SQL Server 2008R2 SP3 and had to be done differently.

Now, from the DTU Calculator page itself, it tells you how the process works.  It essentially runs a perfmon trace for an hour with the following counters:

  • Processor – % Processor Time
  • Logical Disk – Disk Reads/sec
  • Logical Disk – Disk Writes/sec
  • Database – Log Bytes Flushed/sec

My client did not have PowerShell accessible for me to use unfortunately.  I normally prefer the PowerShell script, however in this case I had to use the Command Line Interface, they both return the same results.

Click through to see how Jim did it.

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Finding Database Files In The Wrong Folder

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen has a script which shows which database log and data files are outside of the default folder for that instance:

One common issue that bugs me is where databases have been moved from one instance to another, usually through backup and restore, and the files haven’t been moved as part of the restore so they get recreated in the data\log folders for the old instance.

This has caused me various problems, e.g. working out which instance is hammering the disk or using up all the space.

Click through for the script.

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Availability Group Improvements In SQL Server

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Allan Hirt points out two improvements to Availability Groups in the latest SQL Server 2016 and 2017 patches:

First and foremost, SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 2 was just released today. There are two major improvements in it for AGs:

1. SQL Server 2016 now has full Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) support. SQL Server 2016 had partial support for DTC with one of the two scenarios (cross instance/cross platform), but not intra-instance DBs. SQL Server 2017 had both, and now that was backported so SQL Server 2016 supports all DTC scenarios with AGs. This is great news.

Click through for the other major improvement.  This is in addition to yesterday’s notice regarding the distribution database.

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DateTime Arithmetic

Published 2018-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Claudio Silva points out a difference between the DATETIME and DATETIME2 data types:

I’m currently working on a SQL code migration from Firebird to SQL Server and I hit an error that I haven’t seen for some time.

The error message is the following:

Msg 206, Level 16, State 2, Line 4
Operand type clash: datetime2 is incompatible with int

This ringed the bell right away! Somewhere on the code someone was trying to do an arithmetic calculation without using the proper function.

Read on for the solution.

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