A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Adam Saxton explains when you might not want to use the Publish to Web option in Power BI:
Some don’t realize that Power BI Publish to Web is not secure. Adam shows you that this is the case. It’s a bit scary and there are other options to have secure embedding.
For demos and other resources which are supposed to be accessible to everybody, Publish to Web works great. But if you’re deploying company dashboards, not so much.
Comments closedGrant Fritchey reviews a product which attempts to repair corrupted SQL Server databases:
Let’s start with the most important piece of information you need: it works.
The software itself is really simple to use and just does what you need, repairs your corrupted SQL Server instance. On that alone, I can recommend the tool.
However, there are a few gotchas I ran into along the way. Mostly, little stuff. It’s things a little polish in the UI and some clean up around language could help out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with this software. It worked. It’s just how it works that we should talk about.
Click through for Grant’s full review.
Comments closedKathi Kellenberger tries out the Azure Resource Mover:
Another task I may want to perform is to move a VM to another region. I found this set of steps that involves using Azure Recovery Services Vault that seems a bit complex. Fortunately, I recently heard about a new, much easier way to move VMs and other resources called Azure Resource Mover (in preview). It was announced today.
Read on to see how this works. I like the idea a lot, especially for those times when you accidentally create resources in different regions and only realize it when it’s time to tie everything together.
Comments closedJames Serra shows us where to find samples for Azure Synapse Analytics:
Datasets: A bunch of datasets that when added will show up under Data -> Linked -> Azure Blob Storage. You can then choose an action (via “…” next to any of the containers in the dataset) and choose New SQL script -> Select TOP 100 rows to examine the data as well as choose “New notebook” to load the data into a Spark dataframe. Any dataset you add is a linked service to files in a blob storage container using SAS authentication. You can also create an external table in a SQL on-demand pool or SQL provisioned pool to each dataset via an action (via “…” next to “External tables” under the database, then New SQL script -> New external table) and then query it or insert the data into a SQL provisioned database
Click through to learn more, as well as a few other things you can do with Synapse Analytics.
Comments closedAmeena Lalani walks us through NUMA and automatic soft NUMA in SQL Server:
Modern processors have multiple cores per socket. Each socket is represented, usually, as a single NUMA node. The SQL Server database engine partitions various internal structures and partitions service threads per NUMA node. With processors containing 10 or more cores per socket, using software NUMA to split hardware NUMA nodes generally increases scalability and performance. Prior to SQL Server 2014 (12.x) SP2, software-based NUMA (soft-NUMA) required you to edit the registry to add a node configuration affinity mask, and was configured at the host level, rather than per instance. Starting with SQL Server 2014 (12.x) SP2 and SQL Server 2016 (13.x), soft-NUMA is configured automatically at the database-instance level when the SQL Server Database Engine service starts. Please read this documentation and this documentation for more understanding.
Read on for more info.
Comments closedDatabase object-level security is available through the centralized authorization framework of Apache Ranger.
Both fine-grained access control of database objects and access to metadata is provided. Protected database objects include: database, table, column, view and User Defined Functions (UDFs).
Fine-grained access control for special administrative operations that can be performed on OpDBMS is also supported.
Click through for the full story.
Comments closedPreetdeep Kumar shares three metrics which are important for monitoring Kafka clusters:
There are 100s of metrics documented as part of Kafka monitoring out of which CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network related metrics are always useful in monitoring any systems. In this article, I share 3 metrics that I found to be very useful from a development point of view, saved us some time while triaging a few corner cases reported by customers.
Click through for those measures.
Comments closedLonny Niederstadt has a public service announcement:
Trace flag 2549 is no longer required for checkdb or checktable in SQL Server 2016++.
Trace flag 2562 may still benefit checkdb on a system (depends on disk characteristics and tempdb) in SQL Server 2016++, but is not expected to benefit checktable due to the already-limited scope of checktable activity.
Click through for the full story.
Comments closedErik Ejlskov Jensen has some advice if you’re using Entity Framework Core with Azure SQL Databases:
If you are connecting from .NET Framework with EF Core 2.x, use .NET 4.6.2 or later. If there are connection errors with this version or newer, the client will retry immediately, and handle transient connection errors gracefully.
If you are using EF Core 3.x, update to 3.1.7 or newer to take advantage of bug fixes in the Microsoft.Data.SqlClient dependency, that has been updated to version 1.1.3. For older EF Core versions, you can opt-in to a newer version (ever 2.0.0 or higher) as described in my blog post.
If you are using EF Core 5, you get the version 2.0.1. Microsoft.Data.SqlClient, which includes advanced Azure Active Directory authentication options.
Click through for more tips, including how to set up automated retry of commands.
Comments closedBorko Novakovic gives us a rundown of improvements to Azure SQL Managed Instances:
Azure SQL Managed Instance provide management operations that you can use to automatically deploy new managed instances, update instance properties, and delete instances when no longer needed. Most of the management operations in SQL Managed Instance are long-running but until now it was not possible for customers to get detailed information about operation status and progress in an easy and transparent way.
Through the introduction of a new CRUD API, the SQL Managed Instance resource is now visible from when the create request is submitted. In addition, the new OPERATIONS API adds the ability to monitor management operations, see operation steps, and take dependent actions based on operation progress.
Check out this blog post to learn how to effectively utilize new APIs in real-word scenarios.
If this product potentially fits your needs, also check out Vladimir Ivanovic’s post on performance improvements:
Previously, the tempdb I/O operations were governed as part of the instance log rate cap (which used to be configured to 22 MB/s for General Purpose and 48 MB/s for Business Critical). With this set of improvements, tempdb I/O operations are no longer governed as part of the instance log rate cap, allowing for a significantly higher tempdb I/O rates.
The improved tempdb performance will greatly improve the speed of tempdb-bound operations, such as running queries with large sorts/spills, or data loading through tempdb.
It looks like they’ve upped the caps on several storage-related limits for no extra charge.
Comments closed