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Curated SQL Posts

Transport Layer Security and SQL Server

Published 2023-04-21 by Kevin Feasel

Michael Howard provides an explanation:

Invariably, when I ask people what Transport Layer Security (TLS) does, they say something like, “it protects my credit card info when I buy things online.”

The response is not incorrect, but it’s not the whole story, either, and let’s just ignore the server-side credit card protection requirements and PCI compliance for a moment.

TLS provide three security services, with an optional fourth.

Click through for those services and some of the ways we can improve our security posture when connecting to (or hosting!) a SQL Server instance.

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A Use Case for Removing Schema Prefixes

Published 2023-04-21 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand threatens to angry up the blood:

I’ve long been a huge advocate for always referencing objects with a schema prefix in SQL Server.

In spite of what may be a controversial title to many of my regular blog readers, I don’t really want you to stop that practice in most of your T-SQL code, because the schema prefix is important and useful most of the time. At Stack Overflow, though, there is a very specific pattern we use where not specifying the schema is beneficial.

Mind you, Aaron’s use case is a rather niche example, so I don’t plan on burning him in effigy. Just maybe singeing him a tiny bit.

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Kafka Topics and Message Ordering

Published 2023-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Francesco Tisiot calls us to order:

One of Apache Kafka’s most known mantras is “it preserves the message ordering per topic-partition,” but is it always true? In this blog post, we’ll analyze a few real scenarios where accepting the dogma without questioning it could result in unexpected and erroneous sequences of messages.

Click through for a dive into what can go wrong with ordering. The good news is, in most cases, exact ordering isn’t critical. For cases in which it is critical, you’re trading off reduced throughput for increased order integrity.

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Building Strings in Powershell with StringBuilder

Published 2023-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain takes to a .NET class to build some strings:

As I was creating the next post in my ArcaneBooks series, I realized I had not written about the StringBuilder class. As the code in my ArcaneBooks module relies on it in several places, I thought it best to add a new post to my Fun With PowerShell series explaining how to use it before continuing.

It’s a common need in any language, and PowerShell is no exception, to need to add more text to an existing string.

Read on to understand why the StringBuilder class exists and how to use it. If you’re doing a lot of string manipulation, particularly of large strings in loops, this can provide a noticeable performance impact.

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Handling Error 574 during a SQL Server Upgrade

Published 2023-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins sorts out a nasty issue:

Script level upgrade for database ‘master’ failed because upgrade step ‘msdb110_upgrade.sql’ encountered error 574, state 0, severity 16. This is a serious error condition which might interfere with regular operation and the database will be taken offline. If the error happened during upgrade of the ‘master’ database, it will prevent the entire SQL Server instance from starting. Examine the previous errorlog entries for errors, take the appropriate corrective actions and re-start the database so that the script upgrade steps run to completion.

Read on to learn what caused this error and how Tom was able to work around it.

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Thinking about Execution Plan Icons

Published 2023-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis polls the community:

Fast forward to today. More than five years have passed since I published the first pages of the SQL Server Execution Plan Reference. The world has changed, in many ways. But the icons on the reference pages have not. One might wonder whether the choices I made over five years ago are still relevant today. Or rather, I know that they are not all relevant anymore, I know that there is very good reason to rethink those choices. But this time, I prefer not to do this on my own. This time I am asking your feedback.

Click through for the entirety of Hugo’s request. My recommendation would be to keep the SSMS/ADS icon set but not old SSMS or SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. I like and still use Plan Explorer (and it’s the only third-party SQL Server execution plan reader I regularly use) but don’t need to see that icon set in Hugo’s documentation to understand what he’s covering.

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DAX Updates: RANK and ROWNUMBER

Published 2023-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Jeffrey Wang takes us through some DAX language updates:

In the April 2023 release of Power BI Desktop, two new functions, RANK and ROWNUMBER, have been added to the DAX window functions family, along with significant enhancements to the ORDERBY sub-function. These improvements allow ORDERBY to support sorting by arbitrary DAX scalar expressions, rather than being limited to column names. This not only benefits the new functions, but also existing window functions that we have previously discussed here and here. You might be wondering, since we have had RANKX and RANK.EQ since the inception of DAX, why do we need another rank function? In today’s blog, we will address this question and explore other considerations related to using these new functionalities.

Click through for examples and caveats.

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Building an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline

Published 2023-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt busts out the YAML:

In previous blog posts, I explained how to automate the Database Project Build & Deployment process using Azure DevOps (Release) Pipelines. These blog posts focused on setting up as easily as possible using the Classic Editor.

In this blog post, I’m going through the steps of setting up a build pipeline using YAML.

Read on to learn why the YAML-based approach is the best option for ADO and how to build a pipeline.

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