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Curated SQL Posts

Deploying Azure Resources with Terraform and GitHub Actions

Published 2023-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens sets up some new resources:

When you start out with Terraform, you’ll most likely run the code locally with terraform on your own machine. Terraform works with a so-called state-file, it saves the state of the Azure deployment it left behind and compares the (new) code with the state it encounters when it runs again. Changes are resolved by changing, deleting or adding resources that don’t match the state-file.

This works fine when you’re flying solo and don’t have co-workers who can change resources as well. Whenever you need to share code, the industry standard is to use a git solution, whether GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps or some other solution, as long as it has version control you should be fine (providing people adhere to the correct usage of branches).

Click through for a step-by-step walkthrough, as well as explanation of the major actors in that play.

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Load Balancing in Postgres Clusters with pg_cirrus

Published 2023-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Muhammad Ali explains how load balancing works in Postgres:

Load balancing is a critical component of high availability clusters that optimises performance, scalability, and fault tolerance. By evenly distributing database connections across multiple servers, load balancing prevents bottlenecks, efficiently handles increased workloads and improves response time.

In this blog, we will explore how standby nodes contribute to efficient workload distribution and achieving optimal query execution by directing all read/select queries to these standby nodes.

Read on to see how you can use pg_cirrus to perform query load balancing.

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SQL Standards through the Years

Published 2023-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan Tierney notes a new standard:

As of June 2023 the new standard for SQL had been released, by the International Organization for Standards. Although SQL language has been around since the 1970s, this is the 11th release or update to the SQL standard. The first version of the standard was back in 1986 and the base-level standard for all databases was released in 1992 and referred to as SQL-92. That’s more than 30 years ago, and some databases still don’t contain all the base features in that standard, although they aim to achieve this sometime in the future.

It’s a bit wacky to me that you have to pay for a copy of the SQL standard, but then again, it’s not really intended for regular people: it’s intended for companies developing new database products so they can adhere to the 70% of the standard that they want, outright ignore 20% of the standard, and replace 10% with their own incompatible versions.

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The Trials and Tribulations of Migrating SSISDB

Published 2023-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Andrea Allred packs up boxes and moves the database across town:

Recently I needed to move a dev instance from a physical server to a virtual one and needed to do SQL upgrades. We decided it was time to spin up a new dev instance and that required moving SSISDB. I will be honest, I was not prepared for all the things. I also did not have a password for the encryption so I had to force things to work. Because this was a dev server, I wasn’t as worried about what I would lose, I just wanted it to work. Here is what I did.

There’s a lot more here than “restore database from backup,” so click through to read the steps.

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Delegating Permissions Management in SQL Server

Published 2023-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Wolter has people for that:

Both roles can GRANT/DENY/REVOKE any permission within a database. Since that makes members of these roles super powerful, their membership should always be tightly controlled and audited. (also see: Security concept: Audit Trail).
Consequently, most customers just keep this power to the main Administrators-group.

However, there are cases where it is useful to enable a set of non-admin users—let’s call them LowPermission-Managers—to work in a more self-sufficient way and enable them to grant some permissions to other users without the need to involve “the Administrators”.
The emphasis is on “some permissions” asthis only makes sense for low privileges. Making the LowPermissionManagers members of db_owner or db_securityadmin -roles would defeat the purpose.

Read on for two techniques which allow you to do just that.

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Text-to-Video with Azure Open AI and Semantic Kernel

Published 2023-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Sabyasachi Samaddar continues a series on generating video from a series of text prompts:

Welcome back to the second part of our journey into the world of Azure and OpenAI! In the first part, we explored how to transform text into video using Azure’s powerful AI capabilities. This time, we’re taking a step further by orchestrating our application flow with Semantic Kernel.

Semantic Kernel is a powerful tool that allows us to understand and manipulate the meaning of text in a more nuanced way. By using Semantic Kernel, we can create more sophisticated workflows and generate more meaningful results from our text-to-video transformation process.

In this part of the series, we will focus on how Semantic Kernel can enhance our application and provide a smoother, more efficient workflow. We’ll dive deep into its features, explore its benefits, and show you how it can revolutionize your text-to-video transformation process.

Read on for an understanding of how Semantic Kernel fits in and what you can do with it.

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Against Waiting for Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew follows Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

But, lets prepare for it in terms of the technical capabilities we line up in our existing data architecture.

The hype curve around Microsoft Fabric since its announcement earlier in the year has been huge. The problem is, we now face some difficult questions in terms of our technology estate. Especially if we have designs and a project already in flight using other Azure Resources.

Read on for Paul’s thoughts on the matter and why you shouldn’t wait until Microsoft Fabric is officially out—use what is available in the meantime and then decide whether you want to make a transition. Paul leaves one thing in the margins that I would want to make clear: if this is your plan, avoid the dedicated SQL pool unless you absolutely need it or plan to stay on Synapse once Fabric is GA.

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Decrypting Stored Procedures with SQL Compare

Published 2023-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones cracks the case:

I had a client that was struggling with some encrypted stored procedures. They needed to decrypt them, which I know is a pain in the #@$%@#$@#$#@. I had to do this one. This post shows how I sent them some code to do this.

In a previous post I set up some procedures and then showed code to decrypt them. Here, I’ll use SQL Compare 15, which makes this easy.

Read on to see how it works.

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Index Maintenance in Azure SQL DB with Elastic Jobs

Published 2023-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Scott Klein continues a series on index maintenance in Azure SQL Database:

It’s finally here: the third and final blog post about Azure automation. The first blog covered how to automate Azure using Runbooks, the second blog post showed how to do it using Azure Functions, and this blog post will cover how to do it using Azure Elastic jobs.

To be fair, I titled this blog “Automating Azure with Elastic Jobs”, but Elastic Jobs isn’t part of Azure Automation, so please don’t get confused. The goal with this is to demonstrate how to automate some Azure database DBA tasks.

Read on for a brief primer on elastic jobs and how to use them.

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