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Curated SQL Posts

Tools of the Trade

Published 2021-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Mikey Bronowski shares some tool recommendations:

The main tool that I use every day is one I couldn’t live without: Todoist. For work related tasks, personal tasks, and just organizing life in general, Todoist is a to do list app that I’ve relied on to keep my sanity. If I think of something I need to do it immediately goes in the Misc category and I schedule it later. If I think of a blog post idea, it goes in the Ideas column of the Blog Topics category (and if it’s deemed a good idea will eventually go onto To Do, In Progress, and Complete). The free version has more than enough for my needs but if you want additional features or are trying to use it with a team there is a paid version available.

I’m a big fan of Todoist for reminding me what to do, as well as calendar entries for structure and making sure I limit my todo list size.

Mikey also provides great advice: create your own tools. They don’t have to be fancy, so long as they solve relevant problems.

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Time-Saving Tips for Databricks

Published 2021-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Robert Blackburn has a few tips for us:

Adding bigger or more nodes to your cluster increases costs. There are also diminishing returns. You do not need 64 cores if you are only using 10. But you still need a minimum that matches your processing requirements. If your utilization looks like this, you must increase the size of your cluster.

Click through for several good tips.

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Technical and Productivity Tools

Published 2021-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shares some tooling recommendations:

It’s blog party week for T-SQL Tuesday, and I think this is a good choice for a topic. The host this month is Mikey Bronowski, and his invitation is on tools. I work for a tools vendor, and I’ve used a lot of them in my life, so I want to share what I think in 2021. I’ll also say that Mikey has a good list in his invitation of what he uses. I especially like his use of PoSh things and Greenshot.

I’ve going to tackle this in a couple ways as I really have two parts of my job here, so I’ll look at tech tools and then productivity tools.

Read on for Steve’s list.

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Statistics and Ascending Keys

Published 2021-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen looks at a common problem with statistics:

The Ascending Key Problem relates to the most recently inserted data in your table which is therefore also the data that may not have been sampled and included in the statistics histograms. This sort of issue is one of the reasons it can be critical to update your statistics more regularly than the built-in automatic thresholds.

We’ll look at the problem itself, but also some of the mitigations that you can take to deal with it within SQL Server.

Click through for more detail.

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Community Tooling for SQL Server

Published 2021-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

John McCormack reviews several community tools for SQL Server:

Statistics Parser is a web page which allows you to paste in the statistics time,io output from the SSMS messages tab, and it formats into neat tables showing how much IO happens for each table. It is immediately easier to read and you get a handy % column on the right hand side showing you which tables are being read the most. I find this really useful for query tuning because it lets me know where my biggest pain points are. For complex queries, which touch a lot of tables, it just makes it easy to see at a glance where you should initially focus your attention. It also shows worktable and workfile tables which serves as a handy hint that tempdb is in play.

John lists a half-dozen but really drives in on Statistics Parser.

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Useful Tools for Blogging and Productivity

Published 2021-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin shares some recommendations of tools:

While I do feel that the tools that make my job the most awesome are those that help me with productivity, this month’s topic is a bit broader. Most of these, though, are widely known, so I’m not going to go into much detail about them.

Click through for Eitan’s suggestions. I use the majority of these (or at least some alternative) but there are some new and interesting ones for me.

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Connecting Confluent and Databricks on Azure

Published 2021-02-08 by Kevin Feasel

Angela Chu, et al, take us through a streaming data ingestion process:

How do you process IoT data, change data capture (CDC) data, or streaming data from sensors, applications, and sources in real time? Apache Kafka® and Azure Databricks are widely adopted technologies in the industry, but they require specific skills and expertise to run. Leveraging Confluent Cloud and Azure Databricks as fully managed services in Microsoft Azure, you can implement new real-time data pipelines with less effort and without the need to upgrade your datacenter (or set up a new one).

This blog post demonstrates how to configure Azure Databricks to interact with Confluent Cloud so that you can ingest, process, store, make real-time predictions and gain business insights from your data.

Click through for a detailed demonstration.

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Secure Cluster Connectivity in Azure Databricks

Published 2021-02-08 by Kevin Feasel

Abhinav Garg and Premal Shah have an announcement:

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Secure Cluster Connectivity (also commonly known as No Public IP) on Azure Databricks. This release applies to Microsoft Azure Public Cloud and Azure Government regions, in both Standard and Premium pricing tiers. Hundreds of our global customers including large financial services, healthcare and retail organizations have already adopted the capability to enable secure and reliable deployments of the Azure Databricks unified data platform. It allows them to securely process company and customer data in private Azure Virtual Networks, thus satisfying a major requirement of their enterprise governance policies.

Read on fore more detail about how this works.

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Windows Authentication Across Domains

Published 2021-02-08 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Hutmacher shows three methods for connecting to a remote SQL Server instance on a different domain:

A jump box is a virtual desktop on the client’s domain that you can connect to using Remote Desktop. You’d obviously have to ask somebody for access to one, and you’d have to set up your development environment from scratch. This may not be a big issue if you’re in SSMS all of the time, but when you need the Power BI Desktop, Excel or even Visual Studio, this setup can take some time (not to mention asking for local admin credentials on the jump box).

A fourth option is to run the executable with runas and /netonly, like:

runas /user:domain\username ssms.exe /netonly

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Testing Power BI Report Server Datasources

Published 2021-02-08 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Nelson has some cmdlets for us:

I finally did it. I created a function I’ve been wanting to be able to use for *years*. Test-RsRestItemDataSource is here.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started to work on a report I was told was working, only to find the connection info was invalid. This wastes valuable time, especially when you’ve already made changes to the report.

Other times, I’ve been asked to figure out why a bunch of subscriptions weren’t working, only to find out it was a simple connection issue. I’ve always wanted a simple PowerShell command to check the credentials of a bunch of reports before I touch anything.

Turns out, it wasn’t that hard to build at all. I only wish I had built it years ago.

Click through to see an example of this, as well as two more cmdlets.

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