Top 5 New SQL Server 2016 DMVs for DBAs

December 20, 2016 by Sifiso Ndlovu

Since its initial release that was part of SQL Server 2005, Dynamic Management Views (DMV) changed – mostly for the better – the role of database administration (DBA) within SQL Server-based environments. They improved the efficiency of DBAs regarding database server monitoring, issue diagnoses, and subsequent performance optimisation. As a result of this positive reception, it has become customary that some of the highly anticipated items in every release of SQL Server includes discovering what new DMVs will be added. In this article I take you through my favourite top 5 DMVs to come out of SQL Server 2016.

Reporting in SQL Server – Using calculated Expressions within reports

December 19, 2016 by Steve Simon

Introduction

Late in October, I received an unusual request from the head of sales within one of my client sites. Sales sells three articles: bread, perfume, and Jaguar motor cars. Now the reader will note that one of these items is a staple and the other two are for those folks with considerable disposable income. Management within the firm had increased the salesmen’s bonuses for those folks that managed to sell perfume and/or Jaguars along with the standard loaves of bread. The summary report may be seen below showing the final bonus rate for each sales order booked during the month.

How to configure Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in SQL Server

December 19, 2016 by Aamir Syed

Introduction and Overview

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) was introduced in SQL Server 2008. Its main purpose was to protect data by encrypting the physical files, both the data (mdf) and log (ldf) files (as opposed to the actual data stored within the database). Transparent Data Encryption Encrypts SQL Server, Azure SQL Databases, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse data files.

Point in Time Recovery with SQL Server

December 19, 2016 by Dinesh Asanka

Introduction

How often are you working with multiple environments? For example, if you are a database administrator who is responsible for a production environment as well as another environment, it most likely that you will be working with both environments simultaneously. What is the probability that you will execute a script on production, which actually needs to be executed on the other environment? I would say it is high. To prove this point let me present you an example.

Introduction to SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) monitoring

December 15, 2016 by Daniel Tikvicki

When it comes to monitoring of SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) performance, as it relates to the database engine, there are several categories that should be mentioned and compared.

Microsoft SQL Server database deployment process

December 14, 2016 by Mustafa EL-Masry

Introduction

Database deployments are critical tasks that can affect negative in on performance in production. In this article we’ll describe some performance related best practices for database deployments.

How to use SQLCMD commands in the SSMS query editor

December 13, 2016 by Marko Zivkovic

SQLCMD Mode allows creating, testing, executing SQLCMD commands or scripts in SQL Server Management Studio directly in the query editor. This option is available since SQL Server 2005.

Creating a “smart” trigger based audit trail for SQL Server

December 12, 2016 by Syed Shanu

Introduction

Audit tables are used to track transactions for a particular table or tables. For every important transaction table, it’s important to create an audit table. Auditing can be helpful if you need to track who is Inserting/Updating and Deleting data on a sensitive table and/or view before and after data change information.

Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v7.1 for Oracle

December 12, 2016 by Vitor Montalvão

Introduction

SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) is a free supported tool from Microsoft that simplifies and automates database migration processes (assessment analysis, necessary conversions, data migration and tests) from Microsoft Access, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase and DB2 to SQL Server, Azure SQL DB and SQL Server vNext (at the time I’m writing this article, SQL Server vNext stills in CTP1 version, so being a technical preview version it should not be used for production migrations).

How to use Expressions within SQL Server Reporting Services to create efficient reports

December 9, 2016 by Steve Simon

Introduction

As many of you by now know, I am a fan of utilizing expressions within Reporting Services reports to add additional flexibility. Recently I received a client request to create a stacked bar report which in turn would provide access to the underlying data the made up the bars on the chart. My client sells two articles: “Whigs” and “Tories”. Many people like to “buy” them.The idea is to display the aggregated data as may be seen below (gray black and turquoise) and depending on which bar and color is selected( clicked upon), to drill down and to display the underlying detailed data (see below).

How to setup SQL Agent Job alerts to include SSIS catalog errors

December 7, 2016 by Sifiso Ndlovu

I must have been one of the first people who abandoned BIDS as soon as SSDT was first introduced. Although I have never regretted that decision, I do sometimes feel that SSDT has introduced an unnecessary additional layer of troubleshooting package execution failures. Regardless of whether your SSIS packages are deployed using BIDS or SSDT, the common scheduling mechanism used to run those packages is usually the SQL Server Agent. This is where you are likely to encounter additional layers of troubleshooting SSDT-deployed packages. This is because unlike BIDS where package execution details were stored in the same database (msdb) as were the execution details of SQL Server Agent job, the advent of SSDT came with an introduction a new database – SSISDB – which is used to, amongst other things, store package execution details. Subsequently, in order to retrieve details of package execution, we ought to query the SSIDB database.

SQL Server consolidation – Hosting multiple databases on a single SQL Server instance

December 2, 2016 by Artemakis Artemiou

Introduction

Consolidating SQL Server databases and instances is a practice which, under certain criteria, allows organizations to benefit as they can reduce licensing costs, and if properly designed, hardware costs.

Deep dive into Nonclustered indexes for In-Memory OLTP tables

December 2, 2016 by Kaloyan Kosev

With the introduction of Microsoft’s new In-Memory OLTP engine* (code name Hekaton) a new type of nonclustered index was introduced to help you search the in-memory tables based on a range of values. Although the name is similar it does differ from the one we have in the traditional disk tables.

How to use SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) query results in Excel with Power Pivot

December 2, 2016 by Daniel Tikvicki

Prerequisites for using query results from any Analysis Services model database in Excel through Power Pivot add-in are SQL Server 2014 or higher with installed Analysis Services Tabular instance (Multidimensional is installed by default), deployed Multidimensional or Tabular model database (for data source) and Power Pivot add-in for Excel 2010 or higher (Power Pivot is native add-in in Excel 2016).

In this article, the custom SSAS Tabular model database will be used (“AW Tabular”) as an external data source.

How to see the schema of a result set before running a query

November 30, 2016 by Gerald Britton

Introduction

Suppose you’ve been asked to run a query against some SQL Server database but you don’t know anything more than the name of a stored procedure that you need to call. If you are going to do anything with the result set, you need to know at least the names and types of the columns to expect. This is actually a problem faced by many applications, including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).

Deep dive into Hash indexes for In-Memory OLTP tables

November 30, 2016 by Kaloyan Kosev

With the introduction of Microsoft’s new In-Memory OLTP engine (code name Hekaton) the familiar B-Tree indexes were not always the optimal solution. The target of the Hekaton project was to achieve 100 (hundred) times faster OLTP processing, and to help this a new index was introduced – the hash index.

Concept and basics of Temporal tables in SQL Server 2016

November 24, 2016 by Mustafa EL-Masry

In this article I’ll cover all aspects of a new SQL Server 2016 feature, Temporal Tables (System-Versioned), including:

Understanding the SQL Server Proportional fill algorithm

November 22, 2016 by Ahmad Yaseen

When creating a database, SQL Server maps this database with minimum two operating system files; the database data file MDF and the database log file LDF. Logically, the database data files are created under a collection set of files that simplifies the database administration, this logical file container is called the Filegroup. Database data files can come in two types, the Primary data files that contains metadata information for the database and pointers to the other database files in addition to the data, where each database should have only one Primary data file and the optional Secondary files to store data only. The basic storage unit in SQL Server is the Page, with each page size equal to 8KB. And each 8 pages with 64KB size called Extent.

3 ways to improve T-SQL performance

November 22, 2016 by Daniel Calbimonte

Introduction

When customers used to ask for advice to solve some T-SQL Problem, they would show me their scripts, stored procedures and cursors. I saw horrible things doing that job, some things I do not want to remember, and even some I cannot tell you about 😉 In this article, we will talk about performance problems when using while loops in T-SQL. We will also talk about problems with UNIONsand finally the use of JOINS of two or more tables using the where clause (ANSI 89) instead of using INNER, LEFT or RIGHT JOINS using the from clause (ANSI 92).

PowerShell: Get a daily database status email

November 22, 2016 by Aamir Syed

The need for this script came about when I took a new job as a DBA. One of my responsibilities was to make sure all databases were available after the maintenance window which ran during the weekend. Rather than log into each database server and check that the databases were online, I had a script do the work for me and shoot me an email.

SQL Server Partitioned Views

November 18, 2016 by Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server table partitioning is a great feature that can be used to split large tables into multiple smaller tables, transparently. It allows you to store your data in many filegroups and keep the database files in different disk drives, with the ability to move the data in and out the partitioned tables easily. A common example for tables partitioning is archiving old data to slow disk drives and use the fast ones to store the frequently accessed data. Table partitioning improves query performance by excluding the partitions that are not needed in the result set. But table partitioning is available only in the Enterprise SQL Server Edition, which is not easy to upgrade to for most of small and medium companies due to its expensive license cost.

How to create and configure Microsoft Azure HDInsight

November 18, 2016 by Daniel Calbimonte

Introduction

In our chapter about PolyBase, we presented this new SQL Server 2016 feature to query CSV files stored in Azure Storage accounts. We mentioned that in PolyBase you can query data in Hadoop (HDInsight) using SQL Server. HDInsight is a very popular system in Azure that eventually you will need to interact with if you use SQL Server. That is why we will give an explanation for newbies about it.

What’s new in SQL Server 2014 Cardinality Estimator?

November 14, 2016 by Ahmad Yaseen

The Cardinality Estimator is a SQL Server Query Processor component that is responsible for predicting the number of rows that the query will return. This estimation of the number of rows in addition to the SQL Server statistics will be used by the SQL Server Query Optimizer to create the optimal and the most accurate execution plan for your query that has the lowest processing cost to execute.

Creating reports based on existing stored procedures with SQL Server Reporting Services

November 10, 2016 by Nesha Maric

Basic extraction of the SQL Server database data is usually achieved by querying the databases and creating stored procedure to automate the extraction process. Unfortunately, extracting the information in this way will not yield high-end reports, and only basic table-shaped reports are available when extracting the information via SQL Server Management Studio or similar tools. In order to create high-end reports that will include additional projections of the data, such are graphs, lists, charts… SQL Server offers powerful reporting options within the SQL Server Reporting service.

How to use SQL Server Data Quality Services to ensure the correct aggregation of data

November 9, 2016 by Steve Simon

Introduction

An interesting opportunity arose at a client site during early October which provided a phenomenal opportunity to do a Data Quality Services implementation. My client (a grocer) had been requested to produce summary reports detailing the amount of funds spent during 2016 (YTD) with the myriad of manufacturers from whom the chain purchases their inventory. All “accounts payable” entries are done manually and as such are prone to errors.