SQL Server versions

A Quick start Guide to Managing SQL Server 2017 on CentOS/RHEL Using the SSH Protocol

August 8, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram

In one of my previous articles Installation of SQL Server vNext CTP on Linux Distribution CentOS 7, I spoke about the installation of SQL Server 2017 on a Linux computer. Let us now look at another way to showcase that a SQL Server installation and configuration can also be managed using the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol using PuTTY. We shall look at the important details, such as, how to get PuTTY, SQL Server, how to install/uninstall SQL 2017 CTP2.1, Upgrade to SQL 2017 RC1, and install/remove SQL Tools.

How to Configure TDE database with AlwaysOn using the Azure Key Vault in SQL 2016

July 28, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram

One of the recent tasks I undertook on configuring Transparent Data encryption (TDE) using asymmetric key protection with Azure Key Vault with Always On opened a different dimension on securing data for me. Even though it seems slightly complex, if you have the key details, the steps are in fact, really straight forward.

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What’s New in Reporting Services (SSRS) 2017

July 26, 2017 by Craig Porteous

To further the discussion related to Mohamed’s post on Reporting Services 2016 What’s new in SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services (SSRS), I wanted to cover the new features and functionality we see in Reporting Services 2017 as RC1 was released last week SQL Server 2017 Reporting Services Release Candidate now available, separately from SQL Server 2017 which reached RC1 a few days prior.

Overview of Resumable Indexes in SQL Server 2017

June 26, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram

Managing indexes is a critical component of database maintenance but we often don’t think about the indicators behind the index maintenance operations. SQL Server 2017 (CTP 2.0) introduces a very useful index feature, to mitigate the administration overhead of index maintenance which we’ll review and discuss in this article.

SQL Server 2016 Memory-Optimized Tables – The Checkpoint operation

June 21, 2017 by Ahmad Yaseen

The SQL Server Database Engine stores data changes in the buffer pool, in memory, before applying it to the database files, for I/O performance reasons. After that, a special kind of background process, called Checkpoint, will write all of these not reflected pages, also known as Dirty Pages, to the database data and log files periodically.

How to use Python in SQL Server 2017 to obtain advanced data analytics

June 20, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram

On the 19^th of April 2017, Microsoft held an online conference called Microsoft Data Amp to showcase how Microsoft’s latest innovations put data, analytics and artificial intelligence at the heart of business transformation. Microsoft has, over the last few years, made great strides in accelerating the pace of innovation to enable businesses to meet the demands of a dynamic marketplace and harness the incredible power of data—more securely and faster than ever before.

Top SQL string functions in SQL Server 2017

June 8, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram

SQL Server 2017 has been in the talk for its many features that simplify a developer’s life. With the previous versions, developers had to write T-SQL, or user-defined functions using temporary tables, and build complex logic, just for string manipulation. In almost every database I work with, I see many user-defined functions for string manipulation and string aggregation.

Compression and decompression functions in SQL Server 2016

June 2, 2017 by Ahmad Yaseen

The concept of data compression is not a new on for SQL Server Database Administrators , as it is was introduced the first time in SQL Server 2008. In that SQL Server version, you were able to configure the compression at the row and page levels on the table, index, indexed view or the partition. The row and page level compression is not the best choice in all cases, as it does not work well on the Binary Large Objects (BLOB) datatypes, such as the videos, images and text documents.

How to install SQL Server on Ubuntu

May 18, 2017 by Stefan Veselinovic

Introduction

With an increasing number of new servers running on Linux, and even a third of Microsoft’s Azure virtual machines running Linux, they have made a choice to bring SQL Server to Linux in order to increase their market share and attract new customers.

Installation of SQL Server vNext CTP on Linux Distribution CentOS 7

May 10, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram

It was a paradigm shift in December 2016, when Microsoft made their SQL Server database available for Linux; it was the first time in history that Microsoft ever designed SQL Server to run on a non-Windows operating system. SQL Server vNext was released for public preview so the user community could test and deploy SQL Server on a Linux operating system. Microsoft took a major step in diversifying the database technology into the non-windows platform for the first time.

Adaptive Query Processing in SQL Server 2017

April 28, 2017 by Musab Umair

The SQL Server Query Processing Engine is the most complex and sophisticated part of SQL Server. This engine has many responsibilities, but one of the most important parts is to design the query execution plan and execute it in a best and most efficient possible manner.

SQL Server vNext – Does Microsoft love Linux?

April 21, 2017 by Daniel Calbimonte

Introduction

In the 90s and at the beginning of the 21 century, Linux and Windows were decidedly working at cross purposes

However, starting on 2009, Microsoft started to contribute with code in the Linux Kernel. On 2013, Azure supported Virtual Machines in Ubuntu and later came the support to .NET in Linux, Visual Studio for Linux, PowerShell in Linux, support to monitor Linux server to monitor in SCOM (System Center Operation Manager) and now, the support for SQL Server that is on the previous version when this article was published and it is planned to be released this year (2017). Microsoft is a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation now.

SQL Server 2016 enhancements – SQL Truncate Table and Table Partitioning

April 18, 2017 by Prashanth Jayaram

The idea behind this article is to discuss the importance and the implication of SQL Partition and understand the SQL truncate command partitioning enhancements in SQL 2016

One of the biggest challenges for a DBA is to identify the right candidate for table partitioning, as it requires expertise in design and implementation.

What’s new in SQL Server 2016 Reporting Services (SSRS)

March 29, 2017 by Mohamed Osman

Microsoft released many new features in Reporting Services with the SQL 2016 release.:

New Report Portal
Paginated Report Enhancements
Mobile Report Publisher

How to Configure Read-Only Routing for an Availability Group in SQL Server 2016

March 23, 2017 by Ahmad Yaseen

The SQL Server Always On Availability Groups concept was introduced the first time in SQL Server 2012 as an enterprise-level high availability and disaster recovery solution that will replace the database mirroring feature. Always On Availability Group provides a high availability solution on the group level, where each group can contain any number of databases that can be replicated to multiple secondary servers known as Replicas.

Some uncommon but useful T-SQL and Database Engine Enhancements in SQL Server 2016

March 20, 2017 by Musab Umair

SQL Server 2016 is the most advanced version of Microsoft’s Data Platform released yet. This is obviously my favorite one as it has tremendous capabilities and enormous features. These new additions not only enhance the productivity of its users (Database Developer, DBA or Application Developer), but also enable the enterprise to use its data more effectively and efficiently.

New date objects in SQL Server 2016 – DATEDIFF_BIG and AT TIME ZONE

March 10, 2017 by Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server 2016 obtains the values of the date and time using the GetSystemTimeAsFileTime() Windows API, with precision fixed at 100 nanoseconds. The accuracy of these date and time values depends on the hardware specs and the version of the Windows of the server on which the SQL Server instance installed.

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How to import/export JSON data using SQL Server 2016

March 7, 2017 by Marko Zivkovic

JSON is an abbreviation for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is very popular and currently the most commonly used data exchange format. Most modern web and mobile services return information formatted as JSON text, all database web services, web browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer) return results formatted as JSON text or accept data formatted as JSON. Since external systems format information as JSON text, JSON is also stored in SQL Server 2016 as text. You can use standard NVARCHAR columns to store JSON data in SQL Server 2016.

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How to automate SSAS tabular model processing in SQL Server 2016

March 6, 2017 by Craig Porteous

There are many ways to process your SSAS Tabular Model. This can be achieved in SSIS using the Analysis Services Execute DDL Task or manually, through Management studio GUI but to have a little fun & make the task more flexible I’m going to script this with ASSL/TMSL & build a notification round it. We can then schedule this as a step in a SQL agent job, call it from SSIS or PowerShell.

How to Merge and Split CSV Files Using R in SQL Server 2016

February 21, 2017 by Jeffrey Yao

Introduction

From time to time, we may encounter the following scenarios when dealing with data processing:

Top 5 Deprecated Features in Reporting Services 2016

February 17, 2017 by Sifiso W. Ndlovu

It’s not often that I write negative articles surrounding SQL Server’s latest release but ever since we upgraded one of our BI boxes to run SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 (SSRS 2016), I have picked up on some frustrations from my team when using the upgraded Report Manager portal due to the unavailability of features that used to exist in versions prior to SSRS 2016. I have since realized that in spite of the many exciting features and improvements introduced in SSRS 2016, there is a downside to this latest version of reporting services that is likely to leave many administrators frustrated.

How to Import / Export CSV Files with R in SQL Server 2016

February 9, 2017 by Jeffrey Yao

Introduction

Importing and exporting CSV files is a common task to DBAs from time to time.

Scaling out Reporting Services & changes in SQL Server 2016

January 18, 2017 by Craig Porteous

Scaling out Reporting services to multiple nodes, in itself, is a relatively simple process. It’s when we come to solve problems and investigate performance that we begin to see there is a lot more going on under the hood that’s not clear through implementation. There are also some foundational elements that have changed in SQL 2016 with next to no guidance from Microsoft on the changes.

SQL Server 2016 Always On Availability Group with Direct Seeding

January 12, 2017 by Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups are an enterprise-level high-availability and disaster-recovery feature introduced the first time in SQL Server 2012as an alternative to database mirroring. A set of user databases that fail over together forms the availability group. These availability databases are hosted by the availability replicas and can be readable- writable at the primary replica and up to eight sets of secondary replica databases that can be configured to be read-only databases. The availability groups fail over due to the availability replica’s level issues and not the ones caused due to database level issues such as data loss or database corruption.

Native JSON Support in SQL Server 2016

January 6, 2017 by Manjuke Fernando

With the introduction of SQL Server 2016, Microsoft introduced many new features which had taken SQL Server another step forward and they made sure that it stands in front among many major Relational Database Systems.

One such feature which has been lacking but desperately required was the native support towards JSON.