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Curated SQL Posts

Running Diagnostic Notebooks via Powershell

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano kicks off a notebook:

As part of starting a new job you need a way to get a good inventory of basic information of SQL Server instances.  Once you have done what I outlined in this blog post.  I find it helpful to run Glenn Alan Berry’s Diagnostic Notebooks against all the instances to get a static point in time snapshot of all the properties and some performance information.  While dbatools has commands under the Community Tools section for running the data into spreadsheets and creating notebooks for the newest queries I like to go get Glenn’s because he has all the comments in there of what the mean and links to resources about things.  So you can explore that route if you like but I’ll be manually downloading them from Glenn’s site for that reason.  To able to open the notebooks successfully in ADS look for the tip on my blog post on Tools I Use on My Jumpbox for opening large notebooks.

Click through for a script Tracy uses to kick off the notebook regardless of the SQL Server version.

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Updating Synapse Linked SQL Servers with Azure DevOps

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant makes a change:

This post covers how to update both ends of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 using Azure DevOps. As shown at the Data Toboggan conference.

By the end of this post you will know how to deploy database updates to both the SQL Server database and the Azure Synapse dedicated SQL Pool that are used as part of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022, using a pipeline in Azure DevOps. To keep them consistent.

Click through for the process.

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Data Architecture Questions to Ask

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra does some thinking:

As an example, if I were asked what product to use to store data in the Azure cloud, I could come up with at least a dozen options, so I need to ask questions to reduce the choices to the best use case for the customers situation. This will avoid what I have seen many times – a company chooses a particular product and after their solution is built, they say the product is “terrible”, but they were using it for a use case that it was not designed for. But the customer was not aware of a better product for their use case because “they don’t know what they don’t know”. That is why you should work with an architect expert as one of your first order of business: the technology decisions at this early part of building a solution are vital to get correct, as finding out 6-months or one year later that you made the wrong choice and have to start over can lead to so much wasted time and money (and I have seen some shocking waste).

Read on for a slew of questions.

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Migrating SSRS between SQL Server Instances

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley performs a migration:

Good evening. Today’s episode is coming to you from my home office, where I feel motivated to write a blog in the comfort of my home.

Today we will discuss migrating SSRS from one instance of SQL Server to another. Several methods are available for you, but I will show you how to backup and restore the Reporting Services components for a full migration.

Read on for the process and pay special attention to Garry’s notes about encryption key handling.

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Creating a Snowflake Instance

Published 2022-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal sets up Snowflake:

Now let’s start the process of creating a snowflake account in the Azure Cloud. You can sign up for a free trial from here – https://signup.snowflake.com/ I am going to bypass this and go straight to the setup screens. (This is slightly different because as an org-admin I have the power to create accounts)

Select the cloud provider and edition you require; we have already discussed these options before. You know me, its going to be Azure but feel free to dive into AWS or GCP.

Read on for some step-by-step installation instructions.

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Choosing Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Sarah Dutkiewicz compares and contrasts:

Every time I do an Azure DevOps talk, I get someone asking me about migrating from GitHub to Azure DevOps. Every time, I have to ask “Why do you want to migrate from GitHub to Azure DevOps?” Why would you choose between Azure DevOps and GitHub? Or better yet – do you have to choose between them? Let’s look at how they compare and the tooling available.

This is a really tough question and Sarah helps explain why.

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KQL Extract

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Cain continues a series on KQL:

Almost all languages have the ability to extract part of a string. In C#, this is the Substring method of a string. With SQL, it is the SUBSTRING command.

Kusto has an operator that will perform this same task, it is called extract. In this post we’ll see some examples of using it.

Click through to see how extract works.

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Cross-Subscription Key Vault Access

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Coughlin sets up secure Key Vault access:

Let’s first discuss the setup of what we will be discussing in this blog post.  I will have two subscriptions assigned to the same Azure AD Tenant.   Within each Azure subscription I will have a resource group in each.  I will create the Azure Key Vault in one subscription / resource group and then I will create a virtual machine in the other subscription / resource group.  This is just for example purposes; I could utilize other azure services that can use managed identities.   I could also create a service principal for my application to use to get keys or secrets.

In this example we would be using private endpoints.  Are you looking for how to do this with public endpoints?  Check out my recent post on how to do that here .

When in doubt, private endpoints are the right choice. They’re probably the right choice when not in doubt as well.

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Starting a Data Mesh Project

Published 2022-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew continues a series on data mesh:

A common question I get asked a lot when creating a data mesh architecture is where to start? The consultant in me defaults the answer to ‘it depends’, of course 

However, in this blog post I want to give a better answer based on my experience of working with various customers so far. As always, the usual caveats apply, I’m happy to go first when trying to define a starting point for our data mesh delivery and fully accept that parts of this are probably wrong. This is also founded in the knowledge that every customer I’ve worked with is different, with different priorities and very subjective views on why they even need a data mesh architecture. Not to mention various levels of data platform maturity.

Paul also includes some nice roadmap and architectural box-drawing diagrams, so check those out.

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