A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Last week the SQL Server Tools team released a new version of Management Studio, 18.4, and it dropped in the middle of my Query Store full day pre-con on Monday. Those two are related. There were some changes in SSMS 18.4 specific to Query Store, and for a few seconds over lunch I thought about downloading the new version and running it for my afternoon demos. But…I didn’t want to anger the demo Gods, so I stuck with 18.3.
Read on for info on the changes.
Comments closedGrant Fritchey follows up on a Kevin Hill tweet:
There are a million things to learn about in our rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I think this assessment, especially the way it was put, “no longer justify ignoring” really nails some of the fundamentals.
Let’s talk about why you can no longer ignore Docker, Git and DBATools either.
If you’re a DBA and aren’t familiar with Docker, Git, or DBATools, that’s a pretty good trio of things to spend some time learning. You can survive without them, but you’re more likely to thrive if you know them.
Comments closedErik Darling has started a new series. Part one is the intro:
I really wanted a version of the Stack Overflow data dump that was all clustered column store. In SQL Server 2016, that didn’t really work because of restrictions around MAX data types. In 2017 it did, but… If your data warehouse has a bunch of max data type columns, that’s bad and you should feel bad.
The problem here is that once you drop out the “big” columns (AboutMe from Users, Text from Comments, Body from Posts), the entire ~300GB database compressed down to about 6GB. That means if we want a realistically sized data warehouse, we’d need a “Make Big” script, like people used to use for Adventure Works before it went out of business.
Part 2, like a noble spirit, embiggens the smallest man:
One thing I’d love feedback on is advancing dates. Right now, the script doesn’t do that at all. I thought of different ways to handle it, but didn’t like any of them, mostly because of how it might mess with the partitioning function I’m using. I felt like I was overthinking it quite a bit, and decided to leave dates as-is, and only increment User and Post Ids.
A quick note: This script assumes that a database called StackOverflow will be the source of the loads. If you need to use a different version, that’s a manual change. I didn’t want to go down the dynamic SQL route here until I gauged popularity.
If you want to play along at home, you can grab the data dump from archive.org.
Comments closedRyan Adams continues a series on building a SQL Server cluster as a lab:
You are going to create a multi-subnet Availability Group in Part 3 of our series on how to build a SQL Cluster Lab. First you give the Cluster Name Object rights in Active Directory and then install your AG. You will also ensure the AG endpoints are using the dedicated network created for them in Part 1. Here are links to the other articles in the series.
Click through for the video.
Comments closedRJ Zaworski has some principles around high-value testing:
Whatever the tools and approach, software testing proves that software does what it claims to do. Tests help developers eliminate defects, build confidence, practice good design, and ideally all three. They also take time to write, run, and update–time that’s no longer available for other development tasks.
High-value testing seeks to maximize the return on that investment. Like much of software development, it’s as much art as science. But a few practical principles can help keep things pointed in the right direction.
There’s a lot of good advice in this post.
Comments closedArun Sirpal takes us through restoration of a database from a URL:
I think many have covered how you should backup your SQL Server database to Azure storage (also known as backup to URL) but what about restoring? Lets assume you have setup backups and they are working, this is what I usually do.
It’s very similar to restoration of databases from disk, so nothing too crazy.
Comments closedTeo Lachev has some early thoughts on large datasets in Power BI:
At Ignite 2019 Microsoft announced the public preview of large datasets in Power BI Premium. This is a significant milestone as now datasets can grow up to the capacity’s maximum memory (previously, the max size was 10 GB with P3 plan), thus opening the possibility of deploying organizational semantic models to Power BI. I consider this feature mostly suitable for organizational BI as I don’t imagine business users dealing with such large data volumes. I tested large datasets during its private preview, and I’d like to share some notes.
Teo has some open questions, and I’d like to see this shifted down to SSAS too.
Comments closedAaron Nelson announces a new feature in Azure Data Studio:
In order to get all the nice intellisense and tab completion features of the PowerShell language inside your PowerShell Notebooks, be sure to install the PowerShell extension from the Azure Data Studio marketplace.
At this point, the biggest remaining language is R, though I’d love to see F# support as well (hey, Azure Notebooks offers F# support).
Comments closedAllan Hirt looks at a couple announcements from Microsoft:
I’m going to discuss what I feel are the biggest game changers. I knew licensing was changing as I had conversations with Microsoft around this months ago. I was not sure what the final result was going to be, but I’m fairly pleased. Is it perfect? No, but it’s much better than it was.
You’ll definitely want to read Allan’s thoughts on Microsoft’s SQL Server licensing changes, as well as a private preview of Azure Shared Disks.
Comments closedThe first one was a 404 error. When I looked the application event log, I saw the following error:
Operation: getKeyByName
Key Name: ContosoRSAKey0
Message: [error:112, info:404, state:0] The server responded 404, because the key name was not found. Please make sure the key name exists in your vault.The simple reason for the above error is that I was using an incorrect key name or the key didn’t exist in my Azure Key Vault. So the remediation is to check if the key exists in your Azure Key Vault. If not, then create the key.
Read on for additional errors you might run into, as well as a link to an Azure Data Studio notebook to set this up yourself.
Comments closed