A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Steve Jones shows ERROR_MESSAGE()’s extended family:
I was working with a customer that was doing some error handling in procs and helped them do some error tracking. As we were working through things, I realized that some of functions working with errors operated differently than I expected.
Read on to learn more about these error functions and the proper way to use them.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar builds out some data:
If you want to learn or demo Real Time Analytics in Microsoft Fabric, you will need a streaming data source. You can use the built-in samples to get started. But there are several data generators which you can use to create custom streaming sample datasets, Azure Stream Analytics data generator being one of them. You can see them here. In this blog, I will show how to set one up to use with Fabric Eventstream.
Read on for a step-by-step guide.
Comments closedChad Callihan disambiguates two terms:
You may hear or read about locks and latches and assume these terms are being used interchangeably. After all, if you search for synonyms for the word “lock”, you’ll find “latch” as a potential substitute:
In database terms, lock and latch are similar but have unique purposes of their own. It’s not as simple as “you say toMAYto, I say toMAHto.”
Click through for the difference and a few details on latches.
Comments closedI found a nasty bug in SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance recently: sometimes an “online” index rebuild of a disk-based rowstore clustered index (basically a normal, everyday table) isn’t actually “online”. In fact, it’s very OFFLINE, and it blocks both read and write queries against the table for long periods.
If you manage to make it through a rebuild successfully, the problem goes away for future rebuilds of that clustered index – likely leaving you bruised and bewildered.
Click through for the details, including repo scripts and explanation of what should happen in this case.
Comments closedAndy Brownsword removes a blocker:
Blocking in SQL Server will reduce throughput. Excessive blocking can be cause bottlenecks on our environments so helping to mitigate it. Here we’re going back to basics to look at how it happens and how having effective indexes can reduce it.
The word “effective” is the critical one there.
Comments closedIn this video, we will talk about Failover Cluster Instances in SQL Server on Linux.
This video stays in the academic realm because I don’t have an enterprise version of Linux (either RHEL or SLES) and don’t have a SAN or NAS, so I couldn’t actually show any of it off. Still, somehow I turned the utter lack of demo into almost a 20-minute video.
Comments closedI think it’s fair to say that Azure Synapse Analytics has had a hard life. It was announced in public preview as a surprise to most of the community, including Microsoft cloud solution architects. Ultimately meaning that very little private preview testing and feedback on the product was done before showing it to the world. This resulted in a lot of frustration in the subsequent year before it could be classified as generally available and more frustration after that while we battled with the missing production features. Even now, the product is lacking in a lot of functionality. Anyway, this is all in the past. Microsoft Fabric is the new kid on the block, and we need to address the unpopular question about the future of Synapse. And considering I’ve been very unpopular with the product teams before; I’ll take this one for the team. Sorry, but it needs to be addressed.
Read on for Paul’s thoughts. I tend to agree in general with his take, but do read Bogdan Crivat’s response. Bogdan is on the Synapse product team and shares some thoughts as well.
2 CommentsSteven Sanderson reads an Excel file:
Have you ever battled with Excel’s quirky date formats in your R projects? If so, you’re not alone! Those cryptic numbers can be a real headache, but fear not, fellow R warriors! Today, we’ll conquer this challenge and transform those numbers into beautiful, usable dates.
This is a common pain point in a lot of libraries and Steven shows how to solve it in R using a pair of functions.
Comments closedEugene Meidinger has gone indie:
The goal of this course is to orient you to the various pieces of Power BI, identify the source of problem, and give some general tips for solving them. If you are stuck and need help now, this should help.
Note! This is an early launch. Modules 1 and 2 are available now, and the remaining ones will be coming out weekly.
You can see the first module of Eugene’s course on YouTube and throw money at him to get the rest as he rolls it out. And if you do decide to throw money at him, load a bunch of pennies into a cannon and blast them at him, then tell him I sent you.
2 CommentsJana Sattainathan performs a data migration:
The purpose of this post is to give you a skeleton of TSQL code on how to perform a copy of a large table (say from one database to another within the same SQL Server Instance) by breaking up the data into manageable chunks. I have blogged about how to break-up any Oracle or SQL Server table data into chunks in this blog post.
Read on to learn why you don’t want to perform the operation as a single query, and one alternative that’s available. The query is a good bit more complex, but that complexity is for a good cause.
Comments closed