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Curated SQL Posts

Error Trapping with Extended Events

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan wants to know what’s going wrong:

Many times, when I’m using Extended Events, I’m filtering on an Id or procedure name in query text and tracking what’s hitting a database. In these cases, I’m assuming queries are going to complete successfully. Did you know Extended Events can be useful when you’re expecting things to go wrong? Let’s look at how we can use Extended Events to track down error messages.

You’ll get a fair amount of noise on a busy server–especially dev servers where people are writing queries and trying things out—but this is a great technique for seeing if something has gone wrong and we need to look into it before a customer reaches out.

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Trying out Azure Geo-Replication

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Etienne Lopes continues a series on Azure SQL DB HA/DR:

So, first of all, what is Active Geo-Replication?

“Active geo-replication is a feature that lets you create a continuously synchronized readable secondary database for a primary database. The readable secondary database may be in the same Azure region as the primary, or, more commonly, in a different region. This kind of readable secondary database is also known as a geo-secondary or geo-replica.“

Read on to learn more about the topic, including how to set it up and ways to try it out.

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Thoughts on Testing Stored Procedures

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a plan:

While most of it isn’t a security concern, though it may be if you’re using Row Level Security, Dynamic Data Masking, or Encrypted Columns, you should try executing it as other users to make sure access is correct.

When I’m writing stored procedures for myself or for clients, here’s what I do.

Click through for Erik’s guidance. The premise is couched in security testing, though much of this is functionality and performance testing Regardless, it’s a good plan.

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Generating Tables from Files in Microsoft Fabric via Notebook

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres performs a bit of ELT:

When Microsoft Fabric was born, the only method to convert files to tables was using notebooks. Nowadays we have an easy-to-use UI feature for the conversion.

As I explained on the article about lakehouse and ETL, there are some scenarios where we still need to use notebooks for the conversion. One of these scenarios is when we need table partitioning.

Let’s make a step-by-step on this blog about how to use notebooks and table partitioning.

Click through to see how it all works.

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The Benefits of Extended Events

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika talks extended events:

If you look at the Tags section of my blog, you can see that Extended Events is one of the top tags. Also, my first (and currently only) public speaking session was on Troubleshoot Real-World Scenarios with Extended Events. So you could say I am a fan.

Read on to see why, including the type of things you can do with extended events, as well as the normal (because true) complaints.

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Adding a Service Principal to a Fabric Workspace via API

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld tackles a challenge:

Lately, I found myself struggling using the Power BI REST API to add a service principal to the (Fabric) workspace. After I engaged with some other folks, I managed to succeed. In this blog I will elaborate on the mistake I made and how I got it to work. For some this might be a less useful blog. Though, I still wanted to blog this even if it is for my own memory on how to do this.

Read on for the story.

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A Primer on Vector Search

Published 2023-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Booth takes a look at vector search systems:

Recently I built a system that uses vector search to logically truncate long documents and retain the most significant parts according to some search term. I’m a dummy, with no background in machine learning or mathematics, so there were new concepts for me to understand and implementation details to figure out. This post summarises what I learned.

Vector search and vector databases are becoming a fairly hot topic, so this at least grounds you on what they are.

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The Joy of sp_HumanEvents

Published 2023-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling makes a pitch:

While my relationship with Extended Events is complicated for many reasons:

  • Awful documentation
  • Hardly any guidance on usage
  • Almost nothing useful about what type of target to use when
  • Everything stored in XML
  • Slow, unfriendly GUI in SSMS

My need to use them while consulting outweighs my gripes and grievances about how Microsoft has chosen to write about, use, and present the data to you.

That’s where my stored procedure sp_HumanEvents comes in handy.

In fairness, Erik put his virtual money where his virtual mouth is, and sp_HumanEvents is put together quite well.

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Capturing Autogrowth Events in SQL Server

Published 2023-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Miller shares an extended event session with us:

I wanted to share one of the Extended Events I always put on a server when I am in charge of it. It has to do with File growths and captures some important things for me. Before you say that it is in the system_health extended events session, I know that it is there. I have had system_health sessions cycle pretty fast and there are a lot of other events in that trace, so I decided to make my own for just that specific thing so that I can archive the sessions and keep the disk clean as well as pull this information into a table and analyze data in a tabular way instead of mining XE files.

Read on for that script and what it does in practice.

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