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Curated SQL Posts

Defending (Certain) Bad Practices

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand considers the trade-offs:

For the first T-SQL Tuesday in 2023, Raul Gonzalez invites us to talk about cases where we have knowingly implemented worst practices.

Well, I have done it a lot. Most of the posts in my bad habits series are cautionary tales based on my own “learning the hard way.” There are always trade-offs with doing something correctly – maybe proper design is less efficient, or takes longer to write, or has to pass more checks. Over time, though, you start getting a feel for where it makes sense to cut these corners, and where it doesn’t.

Read on for some practical examples around Stack Overflow.

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Business Continuity with Arc-Enabled Data Services

Published 2023-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services. Part 11 covers high availability:

So far in this series of posts, you have been able to deploy and configure your newly provisioned Azure Arc-enabled SQL MI environment. Out of the box you get High Availability without having to do or implement anything.

The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) that is achievable with Azure Arc-enabled Data Services is dependent on the tier you choose to deploy. But regardless of that, this post is only concerned about informing you what you get out of the box with this technology.

Part 12 turns to disaster recovery:

In the previous post, we introduced you to how Azure Arc-enabled SQL MI provides High Availability based on the tier you have deployed.  If your environment requires disaster recovery, regardless of the tier level you have deployed, Azure Arc-enabled Data Services covers the job for you.

Read on to learn more about what options are available and what you need to do.

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Saving Time in Power BI

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Allison Kennedy shares a few tips:

I myself still refer back to that blog post whenever I start a new project where there isn’t a date table already in the data source. Below are a few of my other favorite resources that I visited most frequently in 2022.

Click through for the list of posts and the helpful tips they contain therein.

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Replication from 2000 to 2012

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Gogrui pulls a fast one:

The scenario that I faced was little challenging. We had SQL Server 2012 production server replicating data to a Server 2000 which is used for reporting purposes. Subscriber SQL Server 2000 used by the reporting team were not ready to upgrade the Server as they need to rewrite their entire application as it was using vb6 code. They need a strategy where the data can still be replicated without upgrading the Server.

As I researched, I found that it is not compatible version but planned to test the replication to see if somehow it works. I tested the replication between SQL Server 2012 as a publisher and SQL Server 2000 as subscriber. I was able to setup the transactional replication between the servers for the database but found during the initial initialization snapshot, the ANSI_PADDING setting in the snapshot generated .sch files caused the issue while the distribution job runs. 

Read on for the solution. This turned out to work despite Microsoft’s official guidance that they only support replication between SQL Server instances within two versions of each other.

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Defending Less-than-Ideal Practices

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin has a confession and a defense:

I feel like this is where I should say something like, “Hi, my name is Deborah and I’ve used nolock in production.” I would also have to confess to doing things like using correlated sub queries, not using a foreign key, implemented complicated triggers, etc. I often talk about how the first real SQL script I wrote had cursors running over temp tables in SQL Server 6.5, which I’m fairly certain was one of the first thing I read you were NOT supposed to do. And oh, hello there, denomalized table and dynamic SQL! I’m sure I’ve done more things than this too. These are just the ones I can remember doing, or at least I’m willing to admit in public.

With some of these, the answer is “that’s the best alternative I had at the time.” With correlated sub-queries, I wouldn’t even consider that a bad thing. Granted, I personally prefer a combination of common table expressions and the APPLY operator but that’s usually not for performance reasons.

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Backing up SQL Server with Multiple Solutions

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan tells us a story:

Many years ago, a friend was using a backup/recovery tool for managing their backups. This particular tool on its own wasn’t necessarily bad. But in this case, it didn’t work well. In fact, it barely worked at all. Backups were slow to complete and restores were even slower. Attempting to restore even one database could take 10-15 minutes just to navigate a GUI and start the restore process.

It…was…very…slow…

Read on for the rest of the story. Most of the time, when I see two products used for backups, I typically see a bunch of redundant backups, with both products taking full backups.

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Start and Stop for Managed Instances

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal pushes the big red button:

We all would like to save money when operating in the cloud, Microsoft has released a stop / start concept for SQL Managed Instances – preview mode!

At the time of writing, the Managed Instance needs to be built from the November wave where you will see the functionality in the overview section and it has to be in the General purpose tier. If you have managed links or failover groups then you cant use this feature.

There is a kicker, however, which makes this a less-than-pleasant option. Arun has more detail.

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Moving Azure SQL MI between Subscriptions

Published 2023-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Sabrin Alsahsah migrates a SQL managed instance:

We have recently received a few service requests from our customers to know how to move an Azure SQL-managed instance between subscriptions. In this blog article, we will be discussing supportability, methods, and solutions that can achieve this goal, and you can decide the best for you depending on your business requirements and environment setup.

Currently, at this time there is no direct way to move a managed instance itself, but we can have a workaround by moving the Azure SQL managed databases across Azure SQL managed instances that are hosted\located in different subscriptions.

Click through for three workaround options.

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Ways to Convert a List to DataFrame in R

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun starts the stopwatch:

When you are working with large datasets performance comes to everyone’s mind. Especially when converting datasets from one data type to another. And choosing the right method can make a huge difference.

So in this case, I will be creating a dummy list, and I will convert the values in the list into data.frame.

Click through for a variety of techniques and how well they performed. There are some good solutions in the comments as well.

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KQL Contains and In

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

There are versions of these which are case sensitive. We’ll see a few here, focusing on the contains keyword. In addition there are not versions, which will also be demonstrated.

There is another operator we’ll discuss here, in. It is a bit of an odd duck, in that it is case sensitive by default. We’ll see it and its variants later in this post.

Case sensitivity in search is a curse.

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