Installation, setup and configuration

Rajendra Gupta

Uninstalling SQL Server on Ubuntu

December 31, 2018 by

We learned to install SQL Server 2019 installation on Ubuntu without a Docker Container in one of my previous articles, but we might also get a request to uninstall SQL Server running on Ubuntu as well. Both the installation and the uninstallation of SQL Server is different in Linux than of Windows OS. In windows, we can remove or uninstall any program using the add or remove programs feature. In Ubuntu, We need to run the commands in order to uninstall the programs. However, before performing uninstallation, we need to take care of the below point.

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Ben Richardson

Machine Learning Services – Configuring R Services in SQL Server

October 25, 2018 by

The R language is one of the most popular languages for data science, machine learning services and computational statistics. There are several IDEs that allow seamless R development. Owing to the growing popularity of the R language, R services have been included by Microsoft in SQL Server 2016 onwards. In this article, we will briefly review how we can integrate R with SQL Server 2017. We will see the installation process and will also execute the basic R commands in SQL Server 2017.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to setup a custom SQL Server transaction replication model with a Central Subscriber and Multiple Publisher databases

September 12, 2018 by

In this data-driven era, replication is often a critical requirement for achieving a modern, agile database management environment. It is believed designing an enterprise-grade dataset is the to achieving this requirement but building datamarts from datasets always presents certain challenges

In this article, we’ll discuss what it takes to setup “central subscriber with multiple publishers” replication model, to create an aggregate dataset from multiple sources, and you’ll also see how to scale with the data.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to setup cross-platform transactional SQL Server replication for database reporting on Linux

August 31, 2018 by

In most cases, an organization can either use the existing out-of-the-box database replication features offered by their database software provider or invest in custom solutions to execute and manage database replication processes. The latter option sometimes allows greater flexibility to create data replicas across multiple types on multiple platforms.

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James Rhoat

SQL Server Setup – Instant File Initialization (IFI)

August 31, 2018 by

If SQL Server needs to allocate space, first it fills the space it needs with zeros. Examples of when it needs to allocate space are creating/restoring a database, growing/allocating data and log files, and finally the troublesome auto growth operation. However, most of these slowdowns/long running actions can be improved by enabling instant file initialization. I say most because the one case where this is required is on log file growth. However, even when Instant file initialization has been enabled the log file will be zeroed out before the space is usable for SQL Server.

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James Rhoat

SQL Server Dedicated Admin Connection (DAC) – how to enable, connect and use

August 31, 2018 by

The dedicated admin connection (DAC) can help you out of a sticky situation. This was built to help you connect to SQL Server and run basic queries in cases with critical performance problems. This works by telling SQL Server to reserve a thread specifically for processing your queries in an emergency. While it does reserve a connection for you, it is only one thread, there is no parallelism happening here, in fact, you will receive an error.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to setup custom SQL Server transactional replication with a central publisher and multiple subscriber databases

August 29, 2018 by

In this article, you’ll learn how to setup a simple, custom distributed database replication system.

Introduction

In general, a typical setup of transactional replication model of a central publisher with multiple subscribers includes the creation of a replica database(s) which may serve multiple purposes including:

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to set up a DDL and DML SQL Server database transactional replication solution

August 22, 2018 by

In the article How to setup SQL Server database replication for reporting Server we discussed all about setting up a simple SQL Server transactional replication environment. In this article, we’ll simulate a more robust system that replicates faster and includes both DDL and DML statements. We’ll walk-through the steps to setup a dynamic transactional replication.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Getting started with Azure Data Studio (ADS); initial installation and configuration

August 14, 2018 by

Microsoft Azure Data Studio is a new GUI-based (vs CLI) lightweight tool for developing and managing your modern SQL databases. The tool resembles Microsoft’s lightweight code editor, the open source IDE Visual Studio Code in terms of functionalities and the UI in general. If you’ve used Visual Studio Code (or VS Code), you’d feel at home with Azure Data Studio. Azure Data Studio also integrates really well other products like Azure SQL Database and Data Warehouse has been made very simple. Azure Data Studio is a cross-platform tool available for Linux, Windows, and Mac to manage the SQL Server databases. You can go ahead and download Microsoft Azure Data Studio to try it out!

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Marko Zivkovic

How to install and configure Azure Data Studio for Windows

February 1, 2018 by

Azure Data Studio is free, lightweight database development and operations cross-platform tool for private and commercial usage, that can be installed on Windows, macOS, and Linux for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Azure Data Studio is built to simplify work of database developers, database administrators, and system administrators. Azure Data Studio boosts your productivity with smart code snippets, keyword completion, IntelliSense, source control integration, the ability to view and save results in CSV, Excel, JSON format, and the capability to organize and manage favorite database connections, etc. The first version of Azure Data Studio was released in November 2017.

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Marko Zivkovic

OpenQueryStore for SQL Server – Installation and configuration

January 24, 2018 by

The OpenQueryStore is an Open source implementation of the popular Query store functionality introduced in SQL Server 2016 CTP2. The OpenQueryStore was first introduced in June 2017. Its main contributors are William Durkin and Enrico van de Laar

The OpenQueryStore collects query runtime execution statistics, wait statistics information against a specific database. This information helps identifying performance problems and troubleshooting by quickly finding performance differences.

The main difference between the OpenQueryStore and the Query store feature is that the OpenQueryStore supports SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2014 while Query Store supports only SQL Server 2016 and higher. Also, the OpenQueryStore is open-source which means that the OpenQueryStore code can be changed whenever you like.

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Prashanth Jayaram

How to configure SQL Server 2017 on Linux with mssql-conf and other available tools

December 13, 2017 by

Configuration of any system plays a vital role in its working efficiently. However, configuring a system needs not necessarily be a daunting task. There are several tools that help with the process.

SQL Server on Linux provides a wide range of options for configuration, management and administration.

  1. mssql-conf
  2. Transact-SQL
  3. SQL Server Management Studio
  4. PowerShell
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Bojan Petrovic

How to configure database mail in SQL Server

November 22, 2017 by

Database Mail, as you would expect from its name, is a solution for sending e-mail messages from the SQL Server Database Engine to users. Using Database Mail, database applications can send e-mail messages that can, for example, contain query results or simply alert a user about an event that occurred in the database.

The process of Database Mail configuration has three main steps. In order to complete this successfully, we need to:

  • create a Database Mail account,
  • create a Database Mail profile,
  • and configure those two to work together
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Prashanth Jayaram

How to set up SQL Server Log Shipping on Linux

November 13, 2017 by

Log shipping is a high-availability configuration that perhaps most of us are familiar with. It’s one of the oldest techniques wherein we ship transaction logs from a Primary database to a Secondary database. Log Shipping is still a vital feature used in case of applications that use warm standby for Disaster Recovery. We can see many articles which discuss the process of configuring Log shipping using T-SQL or SSMS.

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Marko Zivkovic
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How to create and configure a linked server in SQL Server Management Studio

June 9, 2017 by

Linked servers allow submitting a T-SQL statement on a SQL Server instance, which returns data from other SQL Server instances. A linked server allows joining data from several SQL Server instances using a single T-SQL statement when data exists on multiple databases on different SQL instances. By using a linked server to retrieve data from several SQL instances, the only thing that should be done is to connect to one SQL instance.

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