Bojan Petrovic

Optimizing SQL Server index strategies

July 2, 2019 by

Index strategies overview

This article is about techniques for optimizing the SQL Server indexes strategy. It is an appendix of the SQL index overview and strategy article in which I covered different areas like what indexes actually do, how to create them, and I briefly mentioned some index design guidelines. Furthermore, I also presented an example of how to design them by tuning and optimizing queries, so I’ve really tried to cover all but there is always more when it comes to SQL Server indexes.

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Sifiso Ndlovu
Data imported using Custom SQL Statement.

Monitor batch statements of the Get Data feature in Power BI using SQL Server extended events

July 1, 2019 by

One shared characteristic among popular data visualization tools such as Power BI is the ease at which data can be extracted from a variety of disparate data sources, usually at a click of a button, as shown in Figure 1. Such convenience, though, tends to come at a cost as you often have little control over how background scripts used to extract data are generated. Yet, this should be of utmost concern for data architects and BI developers alike as rarely do you find auto-generated scripts that are efficient and optimal. In this article, join me as I put on my DBA hat and trace, monitor and review SQL batch statements that are auto-generated by the Get Data feature in Power BI using SQL Server Extended Events.

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Rajendra Gupta

Overview of SQL Server Rounding Functions – SQL Round, Ceiling and Floor

June 26, 2019 by

Developers deal with numerous data types on a day- to-day basis. We need to change the data type or format as per the user requirement. We use ‘SQL Server rounding function’ like SQL Round, Ceiling and Floor to round the values to the nearest numbers. We perform an arithmetic calculation on data as well. It is a challenging task to change the value of a number to an approximate number. We do not want to display decimal numbers in the application front end.

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Ranga Babu
creating elastic job agent in Azure

Azure SQL – Elastic Job Agent

June 24, 2019 by

In this article, we will review on elastic job Agent in Azure SQL and how to configure elastic jobs to run scripts on Azure SQL databases. SQL Server Agent is a powerful component that is used to schedule and execute jobs in SQL server. But in Azure, SQL server agent is available only in managed instances and not in the single databases. To schedule and execute jobs on single databases we have a feature called elastic job agent. This feature is used for scheduling and execute jobs on a single database, all the databases in the server, or on all the databases in an elastic pool.

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Rajendra Gupta
Get-DbaTable DBATools command

Script SQL Server objects using DBATools

June 20, 2019 by

This article gives an overview to generate scripts for SQL Server objects with Windows PowerShell tool DBATools.

Database administrators or developers require generating scripts for SQL Server objects. We might need scripts to store a copy of object script before object change, create specific objects into other database environments such as development, UAT or non-prod environment. It is an excellent practice to keep a copy of the object before making a change to it. We can easily refer to the old script and roll back if required. Usually, we use SSMS Generate Scripts wizard to get these scripts.

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Timothy Smith
The two web apps may add to our Azure costs, but offset costs associated with downtime

Situations When We May Want Higher Azure Costs

June 17, 2019 by

We’ve looked at methods to reduce costs within Azure. We may experience situations where a slight increase in Azure costs will benefit us to help protect our resources and customers when it involves security or other critical updates. When we consider these situations, we must keep up-to-date with the latest patches, updates to development libraries, as well as the possible effects of these updates to our existing code. Likewise, related to resource usage, a resource may be unused or seldom used by a percent of our customers that we keep when we’re ready to switch all our customers while we make the appropriate upgrades to our resources to help with costs. We’ll look at some techniques that we can use to manage the challenge of critical updates while also keeping costs down, or putting costs into a context about what may be more expensive.

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Gauri Mahajan
Advanced Threat Protection in Azure SQL Database.

Vulnerability Assessment and Advanced Threat Protection in Azure SQL Database

June 17, 2019 by

In today’s time where data breaches are highly expected to happen, there is a high need to ensure sensitive data in the Azure SQL databases is secured and which is why data security implementation is gaining momentum across each community. We covered one of the features of Advanced Data Security here in Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification. Let’s dive further into the other two features that Azure SQL offers with this capability in this article.

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Gauri Mahajan
Columns classified using T-SQL in Data Discovery & Classification.

Advanced Data Security in Azure SQL Database – Data Discovery & Classification

June 17, 2019 by

Azure SQL supports in building and managing wide range of SQL databases, tools, frameworks etc. on the cloud. Organizations are drifting towards Azure SQL because of its obvious advantages over on-premises SQL Server and are generating, exchanging and storing data at an exponential rate on Azure. It becomes essential to safeguard, monitor our sensitive data and get alerts on anomalous activities else companies may come under fire for letting data leak and hacked.

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Rajendra Gupta
insert sample data

SQL Between Operator overview and examples

June 11, 2019 by

We extract data from SQL Server tables along with various conditions. Usually, we have data in large amounts and SQL Between operator helps to extract a specific range of data from this huge data. For example, suppose we want to know the product sales between Jan 2019 to May 2019. In this case, we can use this operator in a SQL query.

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