A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jordan Boich tells it like it is:
As anyone in IT will tell you, when an outage strikes, and all hands are on deck, that is something that will wake you up faster than any cup of coffee. That was me. Waking up trying to get my bearings to take part in addressing an outage with my bed-head in full effect (Thank you Microsoft Teams for giving that little preview window to show what you look like before you turn on your camera).
Click through for the full story.
Leave a CommentGreg Low makes use of an uncommon function:
If your T-SQL is buried under layers of nested
REPLACE()calls just to swap out a few characters, there’s a simpler way. SQL Server’sTRANSLATE()function — introduced in 2017 but still rarely used — lets you replace multiple characters in a single string with one function call instead of stacking severalREPLACE()functions inside each other.This guide covers how
TRANSLATE()works, how it compares toREPLACE(), and where it falls short compared to other SQL dialects like PostgreSQL and Oracle.
One important thing to remember with TRANSLATE() is that it’s a character-for-character replacement. In other words, if you TRANSLATE('ABCDEFG', 'x'), it will replace every instance of each of those characters with the letter “x.” It doesn’t replace a substring.
Aaron Bertrand sees that it’s all funhouse mirrors:
On this site, we usually talk about SQL Server performance problems that involve execution plans, locking, indexes, and waits. But SQL Server Agent can determine when backups, maintenance, ETL, monitoring, and reporting all arrive at the instance. In a way, a job deployment script is part of your performance configuration: you can materially impact the workload if you accidentally share a schedule across too many jobs.
I often create jobs in test environments that will later get distributed to many servers, often in isolated environments that can’t see each other. Creating an idempotent script to create a job, but only if it doesn’t already exist, can be cumbersome to get right. Many will prefer to use DbaTools Copy-DbaAgentJob, and that can be a great option if your deployment mechanism is PowerShell, DbaTools is already entrenched in your environment, and you can run the script from a place that can see the other server. In our case, T-SQL scripts are often passed on to colleagues or automation to be run independently in a different environment. Apologies to friends of SSMS, but the default right-click > Script Job output leaves a lot to be desired:
Click through for a variety of problems that the scripting logic has, as well as the solution Aaron came up with.
Leave a CommentVlad Drumea performs some tests:
After the ANCPI hack that took down Romania’s land registry, Andrei Avădănei, CEO of Bit Sentinel and founder of DefCamp, published on LinkedIn a detailed proposal for a national offensive security program.
It covered pentesting frameworks, vulnerability disclosure, continuous monitoring, and accountability measures. The proposal was thorough, logical, and exclusively focused on prevention and detection.I left a comment suggesting one addition: mandatory disaster recovery simulations.
Can institution X recover after their entire production environment is encrypted? If so, how long does it take and what data is lost? Are there backups? And if yes, are they actually viable, or are they Schrödinger’s backups, where you only find out whether they work at the exact moment you need them?This exchange made me realize that organizations, especially in the public sector, rarely consider doing disaster recovery tests.
I’ve been on the edges of DR scenarios at prior jobs, including one at a state agency. Most of the time, the tests have to be hypothetical or piecemeal because we rarely had the hardware to support a full switch-over, or the budget to spin up an equivalent set of hardware in a different region.
Leave a CommentAndy Brownsword gets beyond SQL Server 2000:
Date handling in SQL Server tends to accumulate tried and trusted combinations of
DATEPART(),DATEADD(), andDATEDIFF()– with nested variations. The challenge with these isn’t raw performance, but more with conveying intent and readability.So let’s look at some simpler patterns to try and avoid some of these and be clearer with what we’re trying to achieve.
Click through for some functions that have been around since 2012, and others that just became available in 2022.
Leave a CommentLouis Davidson becomes a cracker jack developer:
This week, I want to sell you on two ideas. First, that you can make any query faster with:
- Zero hardware changes
- Zero index changes
- Zero structure
- Just a few simple character changes in every one of your queries
This change I will guarantee will make your queries screamingly faster. Never will your customer’s wait on query results again. You will have no blocking, no latch waits, no waiting whatsoever.
He probably should sell this as a training course, along with its administrator equivalent: databases hate date, and you can’t have data problems if you don’t have any data.
Leave a CommentChris Webb works around a limitation:
In last week’s post I mentioned that while Power BI reports (unlike Excel PivotTables) do not support the Detail Rows Expression feature, it is possible to partially work around this limitation by using the paginated report visual. In this post I’ll show you how I was able to do this and what is and isn’t possible.
Click through to see how. I’m unclear as to whether this also applies to Power BI Report Server, though my default expectation is “No, it does not apply, because nothing new ever applies for Power BI Report Server, because Power BI Report Server users don’t deserve nice things.” But that’s just because of years of experience in not having nice things with PBIRS, not any specific information.
Leave a CommentThomas LeBlanc has a public service announcement:
Microsoft Fabric has been upgrade to a 2.0 runtime for notebooks. This includes updates to the native engine which gives us better performance. More info can be gathered here: Runtime 2.0 in Fabric – Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Read on to see what this means for existing notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, as well as what you can do about it.
Leave a CommentThis important feature shows up in a few places. This article discusses its role in Database Projects and in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS); it defaults to true in both. This simple setting evaluates the delta between your desired schema and your actual schema and calculates if applying your desired schema would result in data loss. If the answer is “yes,” it stops.
An easy example is dropping a table or column. Doing so would clearly lose data. Another, perhaps less obvious, is reducing the range of a column’s data type, like from
INTtoTINYINT, where any existing value under zero or over 255 could be lost. These evaluations are done by the engine whenBlockOnPossibleDataLossis set toTrueand, as a result, you can trust that data in your database is not accidentally destroyed by publishing a schema.
The tricky part becomes dealing with database changes when there will be data loss. For that scenario, I’m not sure the database project approach offers anything significant over writing your own database change scripts.
Leave a CommentAndreas Wolter digs into an environment and builds a report:
Have you ever needed to understand an unfamiliar SQL Server estate quickly? Perhaps you inherited an environment, started working with a new customer, or discovered that the existing server inventory is no longer trustworthy.
In the previous article, Running Get-SqlSafe at Scale Across a SQL Server Estate, I showed how to run Get-SqlSafe across a list of SQL Server instances.
Each report contains a System Overview section. I originally added this section to provide context for the security findings, but it also provides useful estate information such as the SQL Server version, build number, edition, and selected usage indicators.
Click through to see how.
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