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Curated SQL Posts

Azure SQL DB Serverless for Hyperscale now GA

Published 2024-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Morgan Oslake has an announcement:

Optimizing resource allocation to achieve performance goals while controlling costs can be a challenging balance to strike especially for database workloads with complex usage patterns.  Azure SQL Database serverless provides a solution to help address these challenges, but until now the general availability of serverless has only been available in the General Purpose tier.  However, many workloads that can benefit from serverless may require greater performance and scale along with other capabilities unique to the Hyperscale tier.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of serverless auto-scaling for Hyperscale in Azure SQL Database.  The benefits of serverless and Hyperscale now come together into a single database solution.

Read on to see what this means for you and how it can change the billing strategy around Hyperscale.

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Modeling I/O Utilization with Resource Governor

Published 2024-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Michael J. Swart does some modeling:

How do we predict whether it’s safe to put workloads from two servers onto one?

We use Availability Groups to create readable secondary replicas (which I’ll call mirrors). The mirrors are used to offload reporting workloads. The mirrors are mostly bound by IOPS and the primaries are mostly bound by CPU, so I wondered “Is there any wiggle room that lets us consolidate these servers?”

Can we point the reporting workloads (queries) at the primary replica safely?

Read on for the answers to these questions.

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Identifying Old OLEDB and ODBC Drivers on Machines

Published 2024-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Lucas Kartawidjaja goes on a quest:

The vulnerabilities are affecting Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 and 18, as well as OLE DB Driver 18 and 19. For more information and also download location for the security update/ hotfix can be found on the following page: Update: Hotfixes released for ODBC and OLE DB drivers for SQL Server

We do an automated security scanning tool that would flag the systems (servers, desktops, latptops, etc.) that haven’t been patched. So we can quickly identify the systems that need to be patch and patched those systems quickly.

For this post, I was wondering if there is a quick way to identify Microsoft ODBC and OLE DB drivers that are being installed on the systems. 

Click through to see what Lucas came up with.

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Viewing DAX in Microsoft Fabric with SemPy

Published 2024-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant talks about a recent issue:

Recently I have been helping others get up to speed with Microsoft Fabric. Which includes going through some Power BI topics.

One issue that came up was how to show them the DAX used for a measure within a Power BI report that had been published to Microsoft Fabric. To link working with measures in Power BI Desktop with working in Microsoft Fabric.

Kevin shows the normal way of doing this, as well as an alternative using the SemPy library.

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Breaking out a CHECKDB Run

Published 2024-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski fixed a problem:

Regular execution of DBCC CHECKDB is a cornerstone practice for DBAs, ensuring that databases are free from corruption. However, this routine maintenance can sometimes feel more like a Herculean task, especially when DBCC CHECKDB runs slower than a snail in molasses, or worse, gets terminated because it runs too slow.

Read on to see what Mikey did to fix the issue. This is a good reminder that sometimes, there is no single silver bullet, but a whole magazine of lead can still get you to the same location.

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Troubleshooting a Stored Procedure Performance Problem

Published 2024-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin digs in:

In fact, I just fixed a stored procedure that had its performance change due to an upgrade to SQL Server 2022 last week. We were doing internal testing in our test environment and one proc suddenly took significantly longer than it should have. But it was also a proc that had not changed in months so it was very clear that the reason it became a problem was due to the upgrade.

Click through for some detail on how Deborah figured it out.

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Horizontal Scale in Postgres with PL/Proxy

Published 2024-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Umair Shahid gives us the rundown on one mechanism to scale out Postgres:

As databases scale and user demands intensify, the challenge of maintaining performance increases. While PostgreSQL was originally designed (40 years ago!) to scale up, but increasing demands on the database have created the need to enable it to scale horizontally. PL/Proxy is a database partitioning system designed to simplify the process of distributing database loads across multiple servers. It acts as a transparent layer between the application and the database, enabling queries to be directed to the appropriate shard or partition based on predefined rules.

This article will dive into PL/Proxy, taking a look at its benefits, use cases, and best practices to enhance PostgreSQL’s performance through effective scaling.

Click through to learn more about this product.

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Troubleshooting Performance around a Data Purge Process

Published 2024-02-14 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Mallon troubleshoots an issue:

In January, one of our Staff Engineers sent the following message to the DBRE help channel in Slack:

Morning folks, we had a pretty significant wait spike on the [database]. Circuit breakers closed and reopened quickly. Is anyone immediately aware of a reason why this could’ve happened?

Read on for Andy’s quick analysis and then the root cause and solution.

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