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Curated SQL Posts

In-Place Upgrades or New Builds?

Published 2023-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Ben DeBow asks the tough questions:

An in-place upgrade involves upgrading the existing SQL Server to a newer version without creating a new instance. In other words, the new version of SQL Server is installed on the same server as the existing version, and the databases are upgraded to the new version.

On the other hand, a side-by-side upgrade involves creating a new instance of SQL Server and migrating the databases to the new instance. This approach requires more planning and preparation than an in-place upgrade but can be less risky.

Click through for the comparison. Historically, I’ve always been on Team New Build, though more recent versions of SQL Server do a better job of in-place upgrades, to the point where I’m fairly comfortable suggesting one to a client.

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Cost Optimization with Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2023-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer makes a few recommendations:

Optimizing costs in SQL Managed Instance isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation—there are several cost-saving benefits and capabilities to take advantage of depending on your unique business needs. By taking advantage of these benefits, or better yet, using two or more simultaneously, you can achieve significant cost savings while optimizing your business operations.

Click through for the list. None of it is earth-shattering, but they are still things to keep in mind along the way.

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xp_cmdshell Is Not the Problem

Published 2023-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler gives it to us straight:

xp_cmdshell is an extended SQL stored proc that allows users to run Windows command prompt commands from within SQL. Sound scary? It might, but is xp_cmdshell really a security risk?

Well a lot of people think so, many DBAs and IT departments will insist that it’s always disabled and many auditors and pen testers will raise it a significant vulnerability if they see it enabled on any of your SQL Servers.

But is it really that much of a security risk?

Click through for David’s thoughts, which match my own quite well here. Either xp_cmdshell is not the problem because you explicitly needed to make bad decisions in order for it to hurt you, or xp_cmdshell is not the problem because a bad person got access to a sysadmin account and hurt you. In neither case was xp_cmdshell the proximate cause.

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Manual Halloween Problem Protection

Published 2023-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Poche takes us through Halloween problem protection and builds out his own method, with blackjack and hookers:

Well, if SQL Server is trying to separate the read from the write, why don’t I just do that myself? I had the idea to read the data I needed in an INSERT…SELECT statement, writing into a memory-optimized table variable (motv). I could make sure the read included all the columns I need to calculate the new value, including the CASE statement I had in the SET clause of the UPDATE.

Click through for Jared’s explanation of how to implement it, as well as the circumstances in which it might be faster than what you get by letting a single T-SQL statement handle the job.

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Security Replication in Power BI

Published 2023-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld and Vytautas Kraujalis lock things down, over and over and over:

Imagine, you have everything setup and well secured in your data lakehouse, or data warehouse if you will. Then a user starts consuming the data in Power BI and imports all data according to the security applied to that users’ permissions. Once the data is imported, all data can easily be shared to others who might have other permissions on the same dataset. Potentially, this leads to a breach of data to people who should not have accessed this data at all. Ideally, you replicate the security from the source into Power BI, but without setting up everything by hand.

In this blog post, you will learn how you can automate the replication of security from source to your Power BI data model in just a few steps. A blog post based on an actual client case and written by Vytautas Kraujalis and myself.

Click through for an explanation and a link to the GitHub repo containing all of the scripts.

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Finding the Max (or Min) Value across Columns

Published 2023-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Dodd tries out some new syntax:

Have you ever had 2 columns in a table that you need to select the maximum value from? Not the maximum value from each column, but the biggest value after comparing the columns?

Usually where I have this problem, I’d use a CASE statement, but there’s another way. 

I do like GREATEST() and LEAST() (or argmax/argmin if you’re used to those terms), though Greg does include how you can get the same functionality in versions prior to SQL Server 2022.

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Creating an Alias in Elasticsearch

Published 2023-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

The Big Data in Real World team needs an alias:

An alias as the name suggests is an alias or another name to the index in Elasticsearch. It is quite useful when you want to refer to an index by another name. So instead of performing an reindex to rename or cloning an index you can create an alias to the index.

Click through for the script to create an alias, how you might use one, and the right way to delete one without removing the underlying article.

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Migration Tool for Cosmos DB

Published 2023-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Savran reviews a tool:

Migrating databases to a new database server is a big job. You need to have the right tools to make this process easy for everyone. Cosmos DB had a Data Migration Tool to move data from a bunch of sources. It was a great, free tool with an easy user interface. You didn’t have to be a developer to use this tool. Here is a screenshot of what it used to look like.

     Unfortunately, the tool got old and did not get updated with upcoming SDK changes. It worked only in Windows environments too.

Click through for Hasan’s thoughts. I had a behind-the-scenes look at everything getting put together, in that I was supposed to help, got busy, and slinked away as really sharp people like Carey Payette and John Bowen drove the project to completion.

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Building a Wordle Solver in Powershell and T-SQL

Published 2023-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Shane O’Neill takes this T-SQL Tuesday to heart:

I got swept up in that wave for a while in the same way I got swept up in the other trends of my time, like Pokemon, Sodoku, and Angry Birds.

Eventually, I stopped when I found a PowerShell script by Kieran Walsh ( github | twitter ) where you could narrow down to the correct answer by putting in the results of your guess each round.

This hack led to me realising how much time I was spending on Wordle and that I should stop, much like I did with Pokemon, Sodoku, and Angry Birds.

So, what better thing to do than to try and recreate that PowerShell script in T-SQL

And given Shane’s time restriction, I’d say the end result is a good one.

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Stopping an SSIS Package from the SSIS Catalog

Published 2023-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt hits the big red button:

I developed my package in Visual Studio 2019 and deployed my changes to my SSIS Catalog (SSISDB in my case). As soon as my SSIS Package was deployed I started the SSIS Package execution.

After a couple of minutes, I realised I made a mistake. I didn’t want to lose too much time, so I looked for a way to stop the SSIS Package Execution.

Since I was not executing the package from a SQL Server Agent Job, I couldn’t just stop the job. So I needed to find another way.

Click through for a way to do this via SQL Server Management Studio.

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