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Curated SQL Posts

Indexing in SQL Server Graph

Published 2023-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis offers a mea culpa:

In my post, I pointed out that SQL Server automatically creates a unique nonclustered index on the (internal and hidden) column graph_id, that you can delete, but can’t modify. I added that users cannot specify indexes on that column, nor on the other internal and hidden columns that exist in edge tables (from_obj_id, from_id, to_obj_id, and to_id). These statements are factually correct, but misleading.

I then concluded from those facts that once you delete the automatically generated index, you can not re-create it. This is actually incorrect.

Read on for the correct answer, as well as more information on indexing practices and advice on the right kinds of indexes to create on graph tables.

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Fabric Data Integration

Published 2023-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev reviews the primary methods for data ingestion in Microsoft Fabric:

Fabric supports three options for automated data integration: Data Pipeline (Azure Data Factory pipeline), Dataflow Gen2 (Power BI dataflow), and Notebook (Spark). I summarize these three options in the following table, which loosely resembles the Microsoft comparison table but with my take on it.

Read on for Teo’s thoughts on the matter.

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VBS Enclaves for Always Encrypted in Azure SQL DB Elastic Pools

Published 2023-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Pieter Vanhove makes an announcement:

A few months ago we announced the support for virtualization-based security (VBS) enclaves in Azure SQL Database. This announcement brings numerous advantages, including robust confidential queries and seamless cryptographic operations, to all Azure SQL Database offerings, independent from the underlying hardware. You can use the feature with any compute tier (provisioned or serverless), purchasing model (vCore or DTU), compute size and region that aligns with your workload needs. And, since VBS enclaves are available in existing hardware offerings, there is no additional cost.

In addition to this preview, we are excited to announce the preview of VBS enclaves in Azure SQL Database elastic pools!

Read on to learn more about how to enable enclaves and add a database to an elastic pool.

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Microsoft Fabric Architectural Icons

Published 2023-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld imports some icons:

In the past, I’ve made a draw.io file for Power BI to help you using the right icons to design your solutions and make architectural diagrams. With Fabric, a bunch of new services and icons have been introduced. This asks for a new draw.io file.

With this blog, I will provide the draw.io file for all new icons and elements of Fabric.

Click through for that link. Also note that you might be more familiar with the new name of draw.io, diagrams.net.

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Creating an HTTP Header Hash in R

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Bob Rudis creates an R package:

HTTP Headers Hashing (HHHash) is a technique developed by Alexandre Dulaunoy to generate a fingerprint of an HTTP server based on the headers it returns. It employs one-way hashing to generate a hash value from the list of header keys returned by the server. The HHHash value is calculated by concatenating the list of headers returned, ordered by sequence, with each header value separated by a colon. The SHA256 of this concatenated list is then taken to generate the HHHash value. HHHash incorporates a version identifier to enable updates to new hashing functions.

Read on to see when it might be useful and other things you should know about the package. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Log Analysis by Hand in Postgres

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Laetitia Avrot looks at the logs:

If you’re one of my customers, you might know how I insist on monitoring your Postgres logs and digging into them to find precious insights on what’s going on with your Postgres. For a long time now, there is pgBadger. For PGSQL Phriday #010, Alicja asks us to focus on pgBadger.

You might be surprised to find out I am not using pgBadger. I will explain why later, but keep assured that I do think pgBadger is a good tool. It will help DBAs get better performance and follow how their instance is doing before there is a very bad problem.

Click through for Laetitia’s reasons as well as an alternative way of analyzing log files.

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Service Broker and the Unstoppable SQL Server Instance

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy shuts it all down:

I was sent a quite an interesting email stating that SQL Server would not shut down. Attempting to stop the service via services or the SQL Server Configuration Manager resulted in a timeout with SQL Server still running. Trying to execute the shutdown with and without NOWAIT T-SQL command resulted in the same, the process still running. Seems quite weird that SQL Server just refuses to shutdown!

Click through for Sean’s investigations, what the result was, and how the customer ultimately decided to deal with it.

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SQL Server on VMware Accelerator YouTube Series

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

David Klee has a series for us:

My SQL Server on VMware Accelerator boot camp video series is now live on Youtube! There’s no strings attached and no price of entry, so now there’s no reason why you can’t join me in this adventure to learn more about how to performance and availability tune your SQL Server on VMware data estate.

Eyeballing this, it comes in at about 8 hours of content. And if you want to learn all about virtualization of SQL Server, I’m not sure there’s a better person to learn from than David.

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Tips for Performance Testing Direct Lake Mode in Power BI

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us some performance testing advice:

If you’re excited about Direct Lake mode in Fabric you’re probably going to want to test it with some of your own data, and in particular look at DAX query performance. Before you do so, though, there are a few things to know about performance testing with Direct Lake datasets that are slightly different from what you might be used to with Import mode or DirectQuery datasets.

Chris shares some great advice and takes us through a good approach for testing. This post is all about the how, not the results.

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