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Curated SQL Posts

Hybrid Columnstore And B+ Tree Designs

Published 2018-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Adrian Colyer reviews a Microsoft paper on the combination of columnstore and B+ tree indexes on a single table:

The authors conducted a series of microbenchmarks as follows:

  • scans with single predicates with varying selectivity to study the trade-off between the range scan of a B+ tree vs a columnstore scan

  • sort and group-by queries to study the benefit of the sort order supported by B+ trees (columnstores in SQL Server are not sorted).

  • update statements with varying numbers of updated rows to analyze the cost of updating the different index types

  • mixed workloads with different combinations of reads and updates

It’s interesting to read an academic paper covering the topic, particularly when you can confirm that it works well in practice too.

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Finding Trace Flag Usage With dbachecks

Published 2018-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell points out an addition to dbachecks:

This will show you
  • the UniqueTag which will enable you to run only that check if you wish
  • AllTags which shows which tags will include that check
  • Config will show you which configuration items can be set for this check

The trace flag checks require the app.sqlinstance configuration which is the list of SQL instances that the checks will run against. You can also specify the instances as a parameter for Invoke-DbCheck as well.

Click through for an example.

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Graph Additions In SQL Server 2019

Published 2018-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Shreya Verma announces one of the new additions to graph database support in SQL Server 2019:

SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database introduced native graph database capabilities used to model many-to-many relationships. The first implementation of SQL Graph introduced support for nodes to represent entities, edges to represent relationships and a new MATCH predicate to support graph pattern matching and traversal.

We will be further expanding the graph database capabilities with several new features. In this blog we will discuss one of these features that is now available for public preview in SQL Server 2019, Edge Constraints on Graph Edge Tables.

In the first release of SQL Graph, an edge could connect any node to any other node in the database. With Edge Constraints users can enforce specific semantics on the edge tables. The constraints also help in maintaining data integrity. This post describes how you can create and use edge constraints in a graph database. We will use the following  graph schema created in the WideWorldImporters database for the samples discussed here.

I know that SQL Server 2017 was a bit underwhelming for graph database work, so I will be interested in seeing how much of the gap they cover in this release.

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Best Practices For Tabular Models

Published 2018-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant has started a new series on best practices for Analysis Services Tabular models:

Data Type Selection

The data type selected will impact the physical storage used, not the compression of the models in memory.  It is important whenever possible to reduce the cardinality of the data in order to be able to sort the data effectively.  When storing decimal numbers, unless you need many significant digits, store the data as Currency as it will take less space in physical storage than decimal.

Click through for additional tips.

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Thoughts On UTF-8 Encoding In SQL Server 2019

Published 2018-10-01 by Kevin Feasel

Solomon Rutzky digs into UTF-8 support in SQL Server 2019 and has found a few bugs:

Let’s start with what we are told about this new feature. According to the documentation, the new UTF-8 Collations:

  1. can be used …

    1. as a database-level default Collation
    2. as a column-level Collation
    3. by appending “_UTF8” to the end of any Supplementary Character-Aware Collation (i.e. either having “_SC” in their name, or being of level 140 or newer)
    4. with only the CHAR and VARCHAR

  2. (implied) have no effect on NCHAR and NVARCHAR data (meaning: for these types, the UTF-8 Collations behave the same as their non-UTF-8 equivalents

  3. “This feature may provide significant storage savings, depending on the character set in use.” (emphasis mine)

Solomon takes his normal, thorough approach to the problem and finds several issues.

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Visualizing Stock Data With Lares

Published 2018-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Bernando Lares shows off some stuff his lares can do around visualizing time series data:

The overall idea of these functions is to visualize your stocks and portfolio’s performance with a just a few lines of simple code. I’ve created individual functions for each of the calculations and plots, and some other functions that gather all of them into a single list of objects for further use.

On the other hand, the lares package is “my personal library used to automate and speed my everyday work on Analysis and Machine Learning tasks”. I am more than happy to share it with you for your personal use. Feel free to install, use, and comment on any of its code and functionalities and I’ll happy to help you with it. I have previously shared other uses of the library in other posts which might also interest you: Visualizing ML Results (binary), Visualizing ML Results (continuous)and AutoML to understand datasets.

  • NOTE 1: The following post was written by a non-economist or professional investor. I am open to your comments and technical corrections if needed. Glad to learn as always!

  • NOTE 2: I will be using the less customizable functions in this post so we can focus more on the outputs than in the coding part; but once again, feel free to use the functions and dive into the library to understand or change them!

  • NOTE 3: All currency units are USD ($).

It does seem to be easy to use for this scenario.

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Basic Linux For The SQL DBA

Published 2018-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman continues her series on getting SQL Server DBAs ramped up on Linux:

Let’s begin with discussing WHY it’s not a good idea to be root on a Linux host unless absolutely necessary to perform a specific task. Ask any DBA for DB Owner or SA privileges, and you will most likely receive an absolute “No” for the response. DBAs need to have the same respect for the host their database runs on. Windows hosts have significantly hardened user security by introducing enhancements and unique application users to enforce similar standards at the enterprise server level, and Linux has always been this way. To be perfectly blunt, the Docker image with SQL Server running as root is a choice that shows lacking investigation to what privileges are REQUIRED to run, manage and support an enterprise database. This is not how we’d want to implement it for customer use.

Unlike a Windows OS, the Linux kernel is exposed to the OS layer. There isn’t a registry that requires a reboot or has a safety mechanism to refuse deletion or write to files secured by the registry or library files. Linux ASSUMED if you are root or if you have permissions to a file/directory, you KNOW what you’re doing. Due to this, it’s even more important to have the least amount of privileges to perform any task required.

Proper deployment would have a unique MSSQL Linux login owning the SQL Server installation and a DBAGroup as the group vs. the current configuration of ROOT:ROOT owning everything. With all the enhancements to security, this is one area that as DBAs, we should request to have adhered to. Our databases should run as a unique user owning the bin files and database processes.

Much of this post is walking us through some basics of security, but it also includes helpful built-in commands unrelated to security, like df to view free disk space.

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Troubleshooting KSQL

Published 2018-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Robin Moffatt walks us through a few scenarios where KSQL queries aren’t returning any data:

Probably the most common question in the Confluent Community Slack group’s #ksql channel is:

Why isn’t my KSQL query returning data?

That is, you’ve run a CREATE STREAM, but when you go to query it…

ksql> SELECT * FROM MY_FIRST_KSQL_STREAM;

…nothing happens. And because KSQL queries are continuous, your KSQL session appears to “hang.” That’s because KSQL is continuing to wait for any new messages to show you. So if your run a KSQL SELECT and get no results back, what could be the reasons for that?

Robin gives us five reasons why this might be.

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Learn Extended Events With This Workbench

Published 2018-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Factor gives us a great walkthrough of Extended Events:

A lot of the information about the way that SQL Server is working that can only be provided by Extended Events (XEvents). It is such a versatile system that it can provide a lot more than would otherwise require SQL Trace. If done well, Extended Events are so economical to use that it takes very little CPU. For many tasks, it requires less effort on the part of the user than SQL Trace.

Extended Events (XEvents) aren’t particularly easy to use, and nothing that involves having to use XML is likely to be intuitive: In fact, many DBAs compare XML unfavourably in terms of its friendliness with a cornered rat. SSMS’s user-interface for Extended Events, thankfully, removes a lot of the bite. For the beginner to XEvents with a background in SQL, it is probably best to collect a few useful ‘recipes’ and grow from that point. Templates and snippets are invaluable.

Phil’s workbenches (especially those written with Robyn Page) are fantastic ways of digging into a topic of interest.

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Integrating Power Query And Microsoft Flow

Published 2018-09-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows us how to take data from SQL Server and send it via Power Query through Microsoft Flow to create a CSV:

The Power Query/Flow integration is still in Preview and I found a few things didn’t work reliably: for example the first few times I ran my Flow I got errors saying that it couldn’t connect to the Azure SQL Database, even though it clearly could while I was designing the query, but that error went away after a while. What’s more it only works for SQL Server data sources right now and I really hope that it is enabled for all the other data sources that Power Query can connect to, especially Excel. These are just teething troubles though, and it’s clear that this is going to be revolutionary for Power Query and Flow users alike!

Click through for an example.

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