Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduces many features that help database administrators, database developers, and BI developers.
In this article, I will cover some of the new features for database developers in these main points:
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As DBAs, we all get to the point where we are asked to setup a new server for a specific environment. Setting up a new server is not a big thing but giving the answer to the question that “how well it will work” might be tricky.
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Usually DBAs prefer stored procedures in SQL instead of functions in SQL Server. Is this a good practice?
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A database recovery process is an essential requirement for database systems, It can be a tedious job and the process of recovery varies on lot of scenarios. The desire to improve recovery results has resulted in various procedures, but understood by few and prone to errors. In this article, I’ll illustrate the impact of stopping the database instance in the middle of a large transaction that was running and discuss several techniques and tools that are available for faster and successful recovery.
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Even now, with SQL Server 2016 SP1 released only a few months ago, it baffles me that there is still no built-in functionality to alert admins or users of failed subscriptions in Reporting Services. We still rely on scripts like the one I’m about to describe or report recipients contacting administrators/helpdesks when their report emails don’t arrive or fail to appear in file shares. This is something that people have had to work around for years. There is some documentation that Microsoft provides to help you get started with monitoring subscriptions from the log files with direction on using PowerShell but it is not by any means a complete solution. (Monitor Reporting Services Subscriptions)
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Importing and exporting CSV files is a common task to DBAs from time to time.
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If you are maintaining a very large database, you might be well aware of the pain to perform update statistics on a very large table.
This article introduces incremental statistics which is available from SQL Server 2014 highly simplifies statistics management on very large partitioned tables.
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The Microsoft SQL Server Distributed Replay feature has been provided by Microsoft since SQL Server 2012 and it is used to replay captured traces against an upgraded test environment.
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Test databases should be processed with unit tests
In many shops code is unit tested at the point of commit. For databases, I prefer running all unit tests at once and in sequence against a QA database, vs development, as part of a Test step, in my continuous integration workflow pipeline. Yes, issues would be caught later than at check-in, but continuous integration largely solves this with frequent iterations, including at a commit itself. So the difference between on-check in, unit testing and unit testing a build created on-commit, is simply that the unit tests will be run against a fully re-constituted QA database, vs Development. The previous article in this series is SQL Server database continuous integration (CI) Best practices and how to implement them – Source control. Read more »
This article provides for a roadmap to continuous integration and delivery best practices, and along the way demonstrates how to apply these with ApexSQL tools and technologies. In some sections this article is aspirational, as no solution yet exists, but demonstrates our plan, direction and roadmap. As the tools that apply these best practices are released this article will be updated accordingly.
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SQL Server temp tables are a special type of tables that are written to the TempDB database and act like regular tables, providing a suitable workplace for intermediate data processing before saving the result to a regular table, as it can live only for the age of the database connection.
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I work for a large, multinational financial institution. Like most companies in this field, ours is conservative and subject to much regulatory oversight. The first has meant that we’re slow to adopt new technologies. We need to be really, really, really sure things won’t break, customer accounts won’t vanish or lose their balances and that the regulators will not raise any red flags. Everything we do is subject to the scrutiny of our internal auditors, even something that seems simple, like rerunning a production job that failed because the host compute was down. I really mean everything!
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In this article, we’ll be creating a SQL Server login form, as shown in the example below, using PowerShell to accept user input. We’ll show the code behind the form, how to capture the user input and utilize it:
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With this article, we continue part 1 of common best practices to optimize the performance of Integration Services packages. As mentioned in the previous article “Integration Services (SSIS) Performance Best Practices – Data Flow Optimization“, it’s not an exhaustive list of all possible performance improvements for SSIS packages. It merely represents a set of best practices that will guide you through the most common development patterns.
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Before we delve into these SQL concepts, note that I like to do all my development in SQL Management Studio. So if you want to follow along go ahead and open that up.
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In this article, we will talk about generating random values for testing purposes.
I once had a customer with software that worked fine in the demo with 30 rows, but after some months, the software had more than a million rows and it became very slow. The problem was not SQL Server, the problem was the application, which was not designed for tables with millions of rows. The customer sued to the software provider and lawyers were needed to create a resolution. If the provider had tested the software with millions of rows, this problem would have never happened.
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In this article, we’ll present a couple of common best practices regarding the performance of Integration Services (SSIS) packages. These are general guidelines for package design and development which guarantee a good performance in most use cases. However, there are always exceptional cases and outliers. The mantra of “measure twice, cut once” also applies here. Thoroughly test any changes to your packages to conclude that a change made a positive effect. This means not only running the in the designer, but also on the server. Also, this article is not an exhaustive list of all possible performance improvements for SSIS packages. It merely represents a set of best practices that will guide you through the most common development patterns.
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There is a lot of talk about how bad triggers are, how you should never use them, etc. I wanted to spend some time reviewing fact vs fiction and do an objective analysis of SQL Server database triggers (both DDL and DML), warts and all. We will review alternatives and compare them with triggers to determine advantages vs disadvantages of each approach.
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TempDB usage can be considered as a performance bottleneck for workloads that use SQL temp tables and table variables intensively resulted in heavy IO usage. A valuable alternatives for the SQL temp table and table variable are SCHEMA_ONLY Memory-Optimized tables and the Memory-optimized Table Variable, where the data will be completely stored in the memory without the need to touch the TempDB database, providing the best data access performance. SCHEMA_ONLY Memory-Optimized table and the Memory-optimized Table Variable are stored only in the memory with no related component in the disk. It involves no IO activity or TempDB utilization. It can also participate in the transactions without the need to log the transactions.
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In a previous article on Connecting PowerShell to SQL Server I went over how you use various methods in PowerShell to connect to SQL Server. In those examples though I only touched on using the current user that is running “PowerShell.exe”. In this article I want to pick up and go over how you would use the same methods, but as a different account. I will cover using both Windows Authentication (where supported) and SQL Login authentication.
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In the article Report Subscription Changes in SQL Server Reporting Services 2016, I covered several changes to standard and data-driven subscriptions that were introduced in the release of SQL Server 2016. However all of those changes related to administering report subscriptions using a GUI (i.e. Report Manager Portal, SSRS Configuration Manager). The release of SQL Server Core, SQL Server on Linux and enhancements on Windows PowerShell, reinforces the growing shift by Microsoft to have SQL Server professionals adopt scripting as one of the ways to carry out their daily tasks. In this article we continue to explore SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) subscription feature by discussing some of the Windows PowerShell commands that can be utilised to administer report subscriptions.
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Often we install SQL Server on clients or we get to clients where they have pre-installed SQL Server Instances. As a DBA we have the Primary responsibility of keeping the Database Up and Running. This responsibility leads to optimizing, performance tuning and many other stuff related to database’s internal objects. While keeping the other aspects in mind many of us have to go through the configuration of the newly installed or pre-installed but un-configured instances. Configuring SQL Server newly instances are not an easy task and a DBA might want to configure an Instance in many ways.
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Once collected, job performance metrics can be used for a variety of reporting needs, from locating jobs that are not performing well to finding optimal release windows, scheduling maintenance, or trending over time. These techniques allow us to maintain insight into parts of SQL Server that are often not monitored enough and prevent job-related emergencies before they become emergencies.
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Troubleshooting SQL Server is all about gathering the right evidence. Ordinarily we utilise a variety of different methods and analyse their output to look for specific areas where we would focus our diagnostic efforts. We could for example, use the results of various DMVs to look at wait statistic and resource information to help us focus our investigation in a particular area of SQL Server.
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