This article discusses the challenges of meeting the availability, and performance requirements of high ended transactional replication environments. In addition, you’ll learn a new innovative approach that can be used to add/drop articles from an existing replication environment while maintaining replication system up and running.
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Troubleshooting performance issues in a database is one of the main jobs of DBAs and by now most can trace the problem back to a query which is either running to slow or is causing a blocking issue on a key table. However, what is often not known is why this doesn’t cause problems in SSMS or why you don’t get the same query plan as what is inside the app. For example, in your extended event trace you see the query running longer from the application when compared to SSMS.
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Business transformation requires solid tools to automate complex integration to seamless deployments. In today’s modern data-rich world, nothing is more important than data management, making it critical to know how to safeguard and meet compliance requirement is very critical and the key to the business success.
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In this article, we’ll discuss how to read SQL Server transaction logs. This article should provide and insight into how the workload is being captured in the transaction log files. We are going to see how to get the transaction meta-data details and the history of the data will give us a clear idea of how the system is working and helps to decide peak usage hours, also helps to log information about who is doing what?
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Experienced business intelligence (BI) developers would tell you that as you move from one project to another, some requirements start becoming repetitive like you have dealt with them before. One such repetitive requirement occurs during SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) development wherein a client would request that a report parameter be configured to allow multiple values from a dataset that is populated by stored procedure, as illustrated in Figure 1.
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Monitoring databases for optimal query performance, creating and maintaining required indexes, and dropping rarely-used, unused or expensive indexes is a common database administration task. As administrators, we’ve all wished, at some point, that these tasks were simpler to handle.
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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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Here you can find 60+ LinkedIn groups ordered by a number of members in it and with short description from the group’s profile page.
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In this article, we’re going to through many of the tools we can use for monitoring SQL Server. SQL Server is chock-full of lots of good reports that allows a DBA to quickly spot whether there is any current performance bottleneck on the SQL Server. Many of these sit on top of DMVs but they give us a visually interactive way to look and work with the data. We’re going to start with SQL Server Performance Dashboard Reports.
Dashboard Reports
Let’s jump into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and the first thing we’re going to take you through out-of-the-box dashboard reports of all levels. They can be found by right-clicking the SQL Server instance in Object Explorer, and from the context menu, you’ll find Reports > Standard Reports:
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SQL Server is pretty good at managing disk space. As long as we do our part to set up appropriate storage types and place files and filegroups properly and set reasonable AUTOGROW settings, it’s almost a set-it-and-forget-it operation. Mind you, I said, “almost!” Sometimes, things do go BUMP! in the night and we need to act. Here’s what happened to me not too long ago:
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The growing importance and complexity of data migration, in an era of exploding data volumes and ever-changing business requirements, means that old approaches will no longer get the job done. We are in a world where everything needs to run instantly. Every Database Administrator or Developer would have definitely heard about database migrations with zero downtime and with zero data loss.
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In SQL Server, both the SEQUENCE object and IDENTITY property are used to generate a sequence of numeric values in an ascending order. However, there are several differences between the IDENTITY property and SEQUENCE object. In this article, we will look at these differences.
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SQL Server 2017 is considered a major release in the history of the SQL Server life cycle for various reasons. From my personal point of view, SQL Server 2017 is indeed an interesting release. After writing lot about it and testing various features of SQL Server 2017, I’d like to walk you through some of its interesting features.
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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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One of the major challenges we face today, in the software development lifecycle, is with respect to development and deployment. As applications are deployed by moving various pieces of the SQL code between several versions, configuration, different editions, and sometimes even different platforms, deployment becomes daunting. In my opinion, scripting helps a lot and can really “grease the wheels” with addressing many scenarios that involve such complexity.
The importance of database level scripting is high, but it is getting easier by the day. Scripting is a process of generating a text file that contains the data structures and data from the database objects.
So, do we have a SQL native tool which serves the various purposes and usage? In some cases, the answer’s a yes, and in others, it’s a no.
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A little curiosity on my part led me to research a little further on the available pieces of SQL Server Tools. A cross-platform tool for continuous integration and deployment, called SqlPackage, is part of SQL Server Data Tools. I picked it up because continuous integration, delivery and deployment are now must-have in the modern-day application development paradigm.
We’d talk about the following in this article:
There are various methods available for bulk data operations.
The BCP (Bulk Copy Program) utility is a command line that program that bulk-copies data between a SQL instance and a data file using a special format file. The BCP utility can be used to import large numbers of rows into SQL Server or export SQL Server data into files. The BCP data files don’t include any schema details or format information. Hence, it is recommended to create a format file to record the data format so in case of any failures, you can refer to the format file and better understand the data format to determine what may have gone wrong..
We’ve been using the BCP tool for a long time, the reason being that it has a very low overhead, and works great for bulk exporting and importing of data. It is one of the most efficient ways to handle bulk import and export of data.
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This article is aimed at helping you understand the sqlcmd utility. Of course, this is a tool most of us have used it at several occasions given that the tool has been around for a decade now. However, to be a solid starting point, this article contains some examples that help you understand the tool from different viewpoints.
This article discusses the following:
In this article, you’ll see how to simulate production loads on a test server with a “record and replay” type situation using the transaction log, batch scripting, PowerShell and a SQL Server agent job.
We’ll be walking through the scenario in the following steps
In this article, we’ll discuss the purpose of database replication and show how you can implement Replication using ApexSQL Log, a SQL Server transaction log reader.
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The real-life requirement
Disclaimer: I assume dear Reader, that you are more than familiar with the general concept of partitioning and star schema modeling. The intended audience is people who used to be called BI developers in the past (with a good amount of experience), but they have all sorts of different titles nowadays that I can’t keep up with… I won’t provide a full Visual Studio solution that you can download and just run without any changes or configuration, but I will give you code can be used after parameterizing according to your own environment.
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We made a collection of the most popular SQL Server bloggers, including a link to each individual blog. The ranking is based on Alexa global score.
If your blog is on this list, you can display the ‘Top blogger’ badge on your blog. Please see the bottom of the page for the instructions on how to display the badge on your website
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So far, we’ve discussed a lot about database backup-and-restore process. The backup database command is an online database copy of the SQL Server database and restore database command gives an option to test the consistency and integrity of the backup file.
As we all know, the backup database command bound with many database options. Indeed, it facilitates the execution of specific backup database command that meets the business requirement.
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So, your manager wants you to figure out how to encrypt sensitive Data? Well, Microsoft has introduced a fairly easy way to configure feature called Always Encrypted. Read more »
In data science, you analyze datasets. Datasets consists of cases, which are the entities you analyze. Cases are described by their variables, which represent the attributes of the entities. The first important question you need to answer when you start a data science project is what exactly is your case. Is this a person, a family, an order? Then you collect all of the knowledge about each case you can get and store this information in the variables.
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