The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

This past week was the 2018 Ignite conference from Microsoft, where we had a number of announcements about the data platform. You can rewatch some of the sessions from the event, and I might recommend the keynotes to see some of the demos and positioning of the data platform. That's the direction that Microsoft is moving their database products, as a complete platform that not only includes SQL Server, but CosmosDB, Managed Instances, Data Lakes, and  more.

If you're a SQL Server DBA, it's time to stop thinking yourself as a SQL Server DBA or developer. Instead, you need to be a data professional, especially on the Microsoft stack. While you might concentrate on SQL Server and live in SSMS, you ought to be aware of the growing options for working on the Microsoft stack. Azure Data Studio, which Grant wrote about this week, ought to be a tool you investigate. You also ought to be looking at the latest version of SSMS, which had it's v18 move into a public preview this week. With these tools being free, companies ought to be moving away from the older versions that shipped with SQL Server 2014 and earlier. Instead you should at least be on a v17 version of SSMS. Talk to your IT group and give it a try today. It works fine with all your SQL Server versions, from 2005 through 2017.

Microsoft is certainly hoping you'll run more workloads in Azure, and that's where the data platform is growing. CosmosDB, which I think has a lot of promise for various types problem domains, or even as a companion to SQL Server for certain types of data. There is an increase in their SLA to 5 9s, which is both impressive and ambitious. I know very few on-premises instances that get by with 5 9s across multiple years, leaving aside the ability to get 10ms write performance in the SLA. The is also multi master replication and support for the Cassandra API. While I haven't done much with CosmosDB, it is on my radar to experiment with as a data store option.

Managed Instances will be generally available on Oct 1, just a couple days away. While I wasn't sure that this product would catch on, I'm not surprised that some companies would like to get away from managing most of the stuff around the database and stick with the data. To me, this, more than anything else, can mean that DBAs at larger companies need to be managing data, security, and more, without worrying too much about the basics of backups and HA. Even threat detection, something few of us are good at, is handled by Azure. The restore demo in the keynote is truly impressive. I'm not sure many of us would want to, or be able to, architect those speeds. At least not as easy as provisioning an Azure Managed Instance.

There are lots of other announcements, which you can read. The one really interesting thing for me was the Data Box announcement. I've had more than a few people be concerned about the initial loads of data into an Azure database or data lake. I've had that concern, and actually been part of a company that FedEx shipped a rack of disks as part of a SAN to a DR site because of bandwidth constraints. The Data Box is a device that you can order and fill, shipping this back to Azure for loading. It comes in 40TB, 100TB, abd 1PB sizes. That is truly stunning to me. Drop ship 1PB if you have the need. You can even see a picture of it from Argenis Fernandez for some idea of size.

It's an exciting time to be a data professional, and Microsoft's data platform continues to grow. I don't know that any of us will know more than a tiny bit about most of the platform, but I certainly plan on increasing my knowledge in a few areas to become better aware of how they work and what they are capable of. I might not be able to use them well, but I can at least have enough knowledge to have a conversation about the technology and have an idea of whether it might solve a problem that I run into at work.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

» Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. These headlines are gathered throughout the week and are posted in real time at the website. Check there for information throughout the week or enjoy this weekly summary of the SQL Server world.

Webinars

The single question to predict success for DevOps, and what it means for change control - In this 30 minute session, Microsoft MVP Kendra Little will share and discuss her three key insights from the 'Gene Kim joins Redgate to discuss The 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report' webinar, and show why these insights make a compelling argument for rethinking your organization's change control process....(more)

How to achieve true DevOps by including the database - As proven in the ‘The 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report’ including the database in DevOps initiatives greatly improves performance. In this webinar we will walk you through Redgate’s Database DevOps solution, showing reliable, scalable and repeatable processes for automating your database development and deployment....(more)

How to monitor hybrid and cloud-based SQL Server estates - As organizations move to hybrid or cloud estates, the perception is that monitoring those servers gets more complicated, particularly if you have different servers on different platforms. In this webinar we will show you that it is quite easy to keep track of your databases and servers, regardless of where they are hosted, thanks to SQL Monitor....(more)

How to lead DBAs to embrace DevOps, rather than fear change - In this 30 minute session, Microsoft MVP Kendra Little will share three key insights from the recent webinar, "Biggest Issues in a DBA's World Right Now." This executive summary will help you understand what motivates database professionals and how you can inspire your database staff to become agents for positive change....(more)

Virtualization and Containers

Running SQL Server 2019 CTP in a Docker container - If you’ve been anywhere near social media this week you may have seen that Microsoft has announced SQL Server 2019. I love it when a new version of SQL is released. There’s always a whole new bunch of features (and improvements to existing ones) that ......(more)

Vendors/3rd Party Products

Redgate's Estate Management Research Survey - Redgate invites you to take their Estate Management Research Survey. Their aim for this questionnaire is to gather some information around the importance of certain tasks within the wider umbrella of ‘Estate Management’ and your satisfaction with your current solutions to them. The survey should take around 10 minutes to complete. Help them continue to support and build relevant tools to help you in your job and in recognition of you taking time to help us, they will award an Amazon voucher or equivalent to the value of $50 to one lucky survey participant. This will be determined in early October 2018....(more)

T-SQL

SQL Server – Formatted Date and Alias Name in ORDER BY Clause - CONVERT function can be used to change the format of DATE to various formats like MM/dd/yyy, dd/MM/yyy, yyy/MM/dd, etc. But have you ever noticed that this will produce resultset with a different order if the alias name is used in ORDER BY Clause? Well, ......(more)

Finding Objects in a Schema #SQLNewblogger - Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. One of the things I needed to do recently was move some objects from one schema to another. I wrote about moving an object between ......(more)

sqlhelp: limit the x-axis of a geometry line graph - I have a #sqlhelp question that requires some code. So hey, blog post time! TL;DR: the geometry::STGeomFromText graph provides too wide a range for the X-axis, for a large variance of Y-axis values. Is there a way to limit the X-axis range? I’m playing ......(more)

Overview of SQL UNION - This article will provide a deep dive into the SQL UNION operator, describing its many uses along with examples and explore some common questions like the differences between UNION vs UNION ALL. To address real-world data requirements, we may need … ......(more)

CCI Bulk Load Pitfalls 2 – Parametrization of Dynamic SQL - Intro In the last blog I showed how important statistics are for CCI bulk load even on small tables. This time I would like to show the surprising behavior of dynamic SQL, based on DB setting. Issue Again, I’m not discovering America here but the impact ......(more)

SQL SERVER – Selecting Random n Rows from a Table - Every day I spend a good amount of time with different customers helping them with SQL Server Performance Tuning issues. Today we will discuss the question asked by a developer at the organization where I was engaged in Comprehensive Database Performance ......(more)

You can’t DELETE TOP (x) with an ORDER BY - Did you know you can’t do this? DELETE TOP (10) FROM SalesOrderDetail ORDER BY SalesOrderID DESC; Msg 156, Level 15, State 1, Line 8 Incorrect syntax near the keyword ‘ORDER’. I didn’t. Until I tried it anyway. Turns out, it says so right in the limitations ......(more)

Overview of SQL Joins in SQL Server - The ability to combine results from related rows from multiple tables is an important part of relational database system design. In SQL Server, this is accomplished with the SQL join clause.  It’s the nature of traditional relational database systems ......(more)

Moving Objects to a New Schema - Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. I haven’t had the need to move an object from one schema to another in years. Really since SQL Server 2000. I wrote about deleting ......(more)

Escaping strings - No, I’m not talking about that nightmare everyone has where a bunch of strings are chasing you across a loom. Not everyone has that nightmare? Just me? Really? Um .. well .. You know, let’s just forget I said anything. Escaping strings is an important ......(more)

Tools

Introducing Azure Data Studio - If you’re watching Microsoft Ignite or tracking the information coming out of it on social media, then you know that Azure SQL Studio has been changed to Azure Data Studio. I’ve got an early release on some of the bits. Let’s explore what’s going on. ...(more)

SOS to ADS - When Microsoft announced SQL Operations Studio last year, I wasn’t thrilled. The move to a VS Code shell was less of a concern to me than having a better SSMS toolset. Actually, with VS moving to MacOS, I was hoping we’d get a slimmer, closer VS version ......(more)

The Lighter Side

International Energy Agency predicts wind will dominate Europe’s grid by 2027 - Enlarge / Scroby Sands offshore wind farm Caister Great Yarmouth Norfolk England. (credit: Photo by: Geography Photos/UIG via Getty Images) This week, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) told the Global Wind Summit that wind ......(more)

A Japanese company has announced a long-term plan to develop the Moon - On Wednesday, a Japanese company called ispace announced that it has two missions planned to the Moon within the next three years and that it has acquired ride-share launches on two Falcon 9 rockets to carry out those flights. The company's founder, Takeshi ......(more)

SQL Server Security

Calculating a Security Principal’s Effective Rights - Security. Oh that most painful of topics. I discussed it a few months earlier when I discussed the need to give rights only through roles to users, so everything is the same in dev and prod except the users who are placed in each role (SQL Server Database ......(more)

SQL Server on Linux

How to Linux for SQL Server DBAs — Part 2 - The series so far: How to Linux for SQL Server DBAs — Part 1 How to Linux for SQL Server DBAs — Part 2 Part 1 of this series covered a little history about Linux, how to set up a Docker container with Linux to utilize as a demo environment and some ......(more)

SQL Server News

Columnstore Indexes – part 125 (“Estimate Columnstore Compression as a System Stored Proc”) - Continuation from the previous 124 parts, the whole series can be found at http://www.nikoport.com/columnstore/. It is quite emblematic that this blog post is following the number 124 in the series – Columnstore Indexes – part 124 (“Estimate Columnstore ......(more)

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters - Yesterday at the Microsoft Ignite conference, we announced that SQL Server 2019 is now in preview and that SQL Server 2019 will include Apache Spark and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for scalable compute and storage. This new architecture that ......(more)

What’s New in SQL Server 2019’s sys.messages: More Unannounced Features - The system table sys.messages holds error messages that SQL Server needs to return to end users. When a new build comes out, I love checking this table to see what features Microsoft has coded, but isn’t quite ready to announce yet. When SQL Server 2017 ......(more)

SQL Vulnerability Assessment now supports Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure SQL Database Managed Instance - SQL Vulnerability Assessment is now available for Azure SQL Data Warehouse and for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance. The assessment functionality and experience are similar to that of SQL Vulnerability Assessment for Azure SQL Database, while exposing ......(more)

SQL Server 2019 Preview - Earlier this week, we announced SQL Server 2019 Public Preview at Microsoft Ignite. All the features that you see in the “What’s New” page are new capabilities that shipped with the CTP 2.0 release. Some of the key changes that people normally wouldn’t ......(more)

SQL Server 2019 preview combines SQL Server and Apache Spark to create a unified data platform - Today at Ignite, Microsoft announced the preview of SQL Server 2019. For 25 years, SQL Server has helped enterprises manage all facets of their relational data. In recent releases, SQL Server has gone beyond querying relational data by unifying graph ......(more)

Always Encrypted with Secure Enclaves – Try It Now in SQL Server 2019 Preview! - Last year, we revealed our efforts to bring confidential computing capabilities of Always Encrypted to the next level, by leveraging secure enclave technologies. Over the last twelve months, the SQL team, alongside Microsoft Research, Windows and Developer ......(more)

Introducing Batch Mode on Rowstore - Last year SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database introduced query processing improvements that adapt optimization strategies to your application workload’s run-time conditions.  These improvements included: batch mode adaptive joins, batch mode memory ......(more)

Security news and thoughts

50 million Facebook accounts breached by access-token-harvesting attack - Enlarge / Facebook reset login tokens for 90 million accounts as it patched bugs that allowed 50 million accounts to be compromised. (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Facebook reset logins for millions of customers last night as it dealt ......(more)

PCI-DSS Compliance Declining, Verizon Reports - For the first time in six years, Verizon has reported a decline in organizations' level of full compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). ...(more)

New Variants of Cold-Boot Attack - If someone has physical access to your locked -- but still running -- computer, they can probably break the hard drive's encryption. This is a "cold boot" attack, and one we thought solved. We have not: To carry out the attack, the F-Secure researchers ......(more)

Newegg Is Latest Retailer to Be a Victim of Magecart Malware - Attackers were somehow able to inject a few lines of JavaScript into the online retailer’s site to allegedly skim credit card information for as long as month before it was blocked. ...(more)

Microsoft offers completely passwordless authentication for online apps - Applications using Azure Active Directory (AD) to authenticate—a category that includes Office 365, among other things—will soon be able to stop using passwords entirely. Azure AD accounts can already use the Microsoft Authenticator app for two factor ......(more)

R Language

Create stylish tables in R using formattable - I love a good visualization to assist in telling the story of your data. Because of this I am completely hooked on a variety of data visualization packages and tooling. But what happens with you need to visualize the raw numbers? Do you open up the data ......(more)

Combining data in R: the skill of merging, joining, and stacking - CategoriesData ManagementTagsData FramesData ManipulationTips & TricksIn companies there typically are a broad variety of data sources which holds large amounts of value separately and are possible to use for the data scientist. But the possibility ......(more)

Lesson 14 - Subsetting Data Frames (continued) - Sorting and filtering data frames would have fit in logically with the last post, but since it had gotten a bit long, let's take a fresh look at those concepts here. To begin, let's use a preconfigured data frame of players for a totally random basketball ......(more)

Product Upgrades and Releases

Oracle Improves Security, Performance in Java 11 - The second major milestone release of Java in 2018 is now available, providing organizations with a release that will be supported for up to eight years. ...(more)

Announcing General Availability of Azure SQL Database Managed Instance Migration in Azure Database Migration Service - Today, we are very excited to announce general availability of offline migrations and public preview availability of online migrations to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance in the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS). The GA release significantly ......(more)

Cumulative Update #11 for SQL Server 2017 RTM - The 11th cumulative update release for SQL Server 2017 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates. To learn more about the release or servicing ......(more)

Cumulative Update #3 for SQL Server 2016 SP2 - The 3rd cumulative update release for SQL Server 2016 SP2 is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates. To learn more about the release or servicing ......(more)

Cumulative Update #11 for SQL Server 2016 SP1 - The 11th cumulative update release for SQL Server 2016 SP1 is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates. To learn more about the release or servicing ......(more)

Announcing Preview of MongoDB migrations to Azure Cosmos DB MongoDB API using Azure Database Migration Service - Azure Database Migration Service now supports migrations from MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB MongoDB API. You can sign up for this preview capability here. Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model database service for mission-critical ......(more)

ODBC Driver 17.3 (Preview) for SQL Server Released - We are pleased to announce a technical preview of version 17.3 of the Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server!  Version 17.3 (Preview) brings several fixes and a couple of added features. Added Support for XA distributed transactions Support for streaming ......(more)

Microsoft readies previews of Azure Digital Twins, Azure Sphere secure-edge service - Microsoft is starting to test a new Azure digital-twinning service, while also making generally available its Azure Sphere and Microsoft IoT Central services. ...(more)

Product Reviews and Articles

The future of SQL Census - SQL Census is a prototype application designed to help users navigate SQL Server permissions. We launched it in April 2017 to address the growing need for DBAs and other IT professionals to see who can do what in their data estate. It’s a tedious task ......(more)

Merging a Conflict with SQL Source Control and Beyond Compare - SQL Source Control (SoC) plugs directly into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and is built with the singular purpose of providing an efficient interface between each developer’s local, working copy of the database, in SSMS, and the source control ......(more)

Introducing Azure Data Studio - If you’re watching Microsoft Ignite or tracking the information coming out of it on social media, then you know that Azure SQL Studio has been changed to Azure Data Studio. I’ve got an early release on some of the bits. Let’s explore what’s going on. ...(more)

What is Projectsv13 in SQL Change Automation? - I got this question recently from someone that was evaluating the SQL Change Automation client in Visual Studio. After setting up a new PoC (Proof of Concept), they were confused about why there is a new entry in their list of SQL Servers. If you’re ......(more)

PowerShell

sql server migration enhancements - A while back, I added some new features to our migration commands but I forgot to blog about them. Then, I used one of the new features for a fast and successful migration, got so pumped and had to share. Multiple destinations Now, you can migrate from ......(more)

sql server migration enhancements - A while back, I added some new features to our migration commands but I forgot to blog about them. Then, I used one of the new features for a fast and successful migration, got so pumped and had to share. Multiple destinations Now, you can migrate from ......(more)

More PowerShell for fun (and profit) – filter files by date - PowerShell provides an easy way to search for and/or delete just the files you want. Let's look at navigating in the PowerShell window, and filtering by name, and by date last modified. The post More PowerShell for fun (and profit) – filter files by ......(more)

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

Power BI Error: R cannot be added to gateway - If you are using R as a data source, you may want to be able to refresh the data or run that R script on a schedule. However, if you try to configure a On-premises Data Gateway to refresh the data source, you will see this error. Extension{"extensionDataSourceKind":"R","extensionDataSourcePath":"R"} ......(more)

Reference vs Duplicate in Power BI; Power Query Back to Basics - When you work with tables and queries in Power Query and Power BI, you get the option to copy them through these actions: Duplicate, or Reference. It has been always a question in my sessions and courses that what is the actual difference between these ......(more)

Converting Decimal Numbers To Hexadecimal In Power Query M - This is a very short post! A lot of people have blogged about how to convert numbers between different bases in M (see for example Maxim Zelensky’s very elegant solution for converting from binary to decimal), but today I noticed there was a very easy ......(more)

Power BI datasets, DAX, gateway update and more… (September 24, 2018) - Switching a report from one PowerBI dataset to another PowerBI dataset (@donsvensen) Get data from PDF in Power BI (@CurbalEN) Using Dax To Handle Multiple Parent Hierarchies (@PowerPivotPro) DAX Guide – the reference I had been wanting (@marcorus) https://dax.guide ......(more)

Performance Tuning SQL Server

When You Need to Tune A View, Don’t Just Get Its Plan - Say your database has a view, and everybody’s queries use it. Let’s take the Stack Overflow database and create this view:CREATE OR ALTER VIEW dbo.vwQuestionsAndAnswers AS SELECT q.Title, q.Id AS QuestionId, a.Id AS AnswerId, a.Body AS Answer, uQuestioned.DisplayName ......(more)

What’s New in SQL Server 2019: Faster Table Variables (And New Parameter Sniffing Issues) - For over a decade, SQL Server’s handling of table variables has been legendarily bad. I’ve long used this Stack Overflow query from Sam Saffron to illustrate terrible cardinality estimation:declare @VoteStats table (PostId int, up int, down int) insert ......(more)

What is the SOS_WORK_DISPATCHER Wait Type? - Upon upgrading to SQL Server 2019 CTP2, you may see the new SOS_WORK_DISPATCHER wait type at the top of the list: The above screenshot is server level wait stats from my four core desktop after SQL Server was running for a few hours. SQL Server wasn’t ......(more)

SQL SERVER – Query to Find the Longest Running Function – Function Elapsed Time - I love my job of SQL Server Performance Tuning and Optimization consultant as every single day I walk into the customer door (well, to be honest, it is actually virtual door of GoToMeeting), I face new challenges and learn new ways to tune SQL Server. ...(more)

Extended Events and Stored Procedure Parameter Values - One complaint I’ve received frequently is that you can’t see stored procedure parameter values in Extended Events. That is patently not true. However, it does depend on where and how you capture the events and which stored procedure parameter values ......(more)

Microsoft News

Windows Virtual Desktop gives you a Windows 7 or 10 desktop on Azure - Enlarge / A VT100 remote terminal, which is basically the same thing as Windows Remote Desktop. (credit: Wolfgang Stief) A new Windows version for multiple users was spotted last month, and now we know what it's for: Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) is ......(more)

MDX/DAX

Understanding DAX Auto-Exist - This article describes the behavior of auto-exist in DAX, explaining the side effects of combining slicers on columns of the same table in Power BI. Auto-exist is a technology built into DAX with the simple goal of avoiding useless calculations. In ......(more)

Controlling Conditional Formatting Using DAX - Power BI has long had the ability to apply conditional formatting to values in table columns. However, many felt that the functionality for managing the colors and parameters used in Power BI Desktop was too limited and didn’t provide the level of granular ......(more)

Hardware News

The Team Group Delta RGB SSD Review: Lite Performance, Light Drive - Today we're looking at another SATA SSD with RGB lighting, but the Team Delta RGB is very different from our previous RGB SSD. The lighting design is far more efficient and flexible, and the storage performance is satisfactory. The RGB LEDs do give the ......(more)

Seagate Fast SSD and SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD 1TB USB 3.1 DAS Review - The advent of 3D TLC flash and high-speed interfaces such as USB 3.1 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 has resulted in a number of economical high-performance direct-attached storage devices in the market. These are essentially SATA or PCIe SSDs behind a SATA ......(more)

Most Microsoft Surface laptops regain recommendations from Consumer Reports - Consumer Reports is restoring its 'recommended' designation for the Surface Laptop, Pro and Book 2, but is not awarding it to the Surface Go. ...(more)

HA/DR/Always On/Clustering

What You Need to Know about RPO and RTO - With clear RPO and RTO--as well as a solid plan that is tested, hardened and extensively redundant--you’ll be prepared to recover from most incidents you face. ...(more)

Burned by Data Losses, Companies Increasingly Turn to Cloud for Backup - Seeking to avoid the loss of data triggered by natural disasters or cyber-threats, companies are more likely to incorporate the cloud into their backup/recovery plans. ...(more)

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Handling real-time data operations in the enterprise - Getting DataOps right is crucial to your late-stage big data projects.At Strata 2017, I premiered a new diagram to help teams understand why teams fail and when: Early on in projects, management and developers are responsible for the success of a project. ...(more)

DevOps and Waste - In this post, consultant Ron Vincent discusses the notion of eliminating waste in our processes -- why it’s important and how to find and eliminate waste in daily activities. As I discussed in my previous blog on DevOps and Leadership, Lean started ......(more)

Databases and DevOps, It’s Not Just Me - Anyone who subscribes to my blog or my YouTube channel as well as anyone following me on social media knows that I talk about DevOps and databases a lot. I can’t help it. I have a real passion for the topic. I sincerely believe we should all be taking ......(more)

Data Science

Data Science in 90 Seconds: Naive Bayes - Click to learn more about video blogger Laura Kahn. This is Lesson 7 in the Data Science in 90 Seconds video blog series from host Laura Kahn. The series covers some of the most prominent questions in Data Science such as Supervised and Unsupervised ......(more)

Data Privacy, Complianace, and GDPR

The Next Wave of Data Regulations: How Businesses Can Navigate the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 - Click to learn more about author Daniel Wu. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) will take effect on January 1, 2020, and much like the European Union’s (EU’s) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) scramble earlier this year, organizations ......(more)

Facebook Uses 2FA Contact Info for Targeted Ads - Researchers discovered that Facebook lets advertise target people based on the phone numbers they use for 2FA and contact information shared by other users. ...(more)

Trump Administration Suggests Tighter Controls on Consumer Data - The Trump administration is seeking public input on ways to protect consumer privacy and data online, suggesting that any plan should increase user control over what information to provide and should require that organizations be accountable for what ......(more)

Conferences, Classes, and Events

New Class Week: Developer’s Guide to SQL Server Performance Tuning - You’re stuck with a database server that’s not going fast enough. You have a hunch that the biggest bottleneck is inside the database server somewhere, but where? In this one-day class, you’ll learn how to identify which queries are killing your server, ......(more)

New Live Sessions on DevOps - I’ve just scheduled two live sessions for October: Tues Oct 2, 9AM PT / 12PM ET: DevOps Terms and Why they Matter for Database Specialists Tues Oct 23, 9AM PT/ 12PM ET:Book Review, “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps” These sessions ......(more)

Join me at SQL in the City to capture the value of DevOps - I’m excited to be giving a 75-minute session on ‘Capturing the Value of DevOps’ at the upcoming SQL in the City Summits in New York City on October 12, London on October 18, and Chicago on October 26. The Summits are for C-level IT executives, directors, ......(more)

Midlands PASS Reboot! - If you’re in or near the Columbia, SC area, we are rebooting the Midlands PASS Chapter. Here is our first meeting information. Oct 2, 2018 5:30 PM – Meet & Greet 6-8 PM – Technical Presentation by K. Brian Kelley Location: WeKnowIT 440 Knox Abbott Drive ......(more)

Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google , AWS)

Storage Configuration Guidelines for SQL Server on Azure VM - SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines service offers the full control of VM and SQL Server and enables the simplest cloud migration path for SQL Server workloads. SQL IaaS Extension is installed on each SQL VM created through Azure Market Place by default. ...(more)

What is Azure Data Box and Data Box Disk? - Are you looking to move large amounts of data into Azure? How does doing it for free sound and with an easier process? Today I’m here to tell you how to do just that with the Azure Data Box. Picture this: you have a ton of data, let’s say 50 terabytes ......(more)

Why you should always build an Azure based VM in a Resource Group - This blog post is based on conversations I witnessed between MVPs around commissioning and more importantly de-commissioning virtual machines (VMs) hosted in Azure. Don’t worry – this blog post is not going to divulge NDA material…. …my MVP award is ......(more)

Sticker shock: Breaking down the real costs of cloud egress charges - Date: Wednesday, October 10, 2018Time: 02:00 PM Eastern Daylight TimeDuration: 1 hour The last several years have seen tech vendors relentlessly pushing customers to store all of their data in the cloud. While it is true that cloud storage use is at ......(more)

Microsoft Rolls Out Digital Twin Technology, Azure Sphere - Microsoft functionality for digital twins, IoT security was showcased at the company’s Ignite conference. ...(more)

Azure means hybrid now - On Monday 24 September 2018, Microsoft announced a slew of stuff at their annual Ignite conference that is going to make life a lot more interesting for many people all over the world. There’s a lot to process, so I’m going to take my time to pick through ......(more)

Why Customers Are Looking At Azure - As a Principal Consultant with Pragmatic Works, I have many conversations with customers about moving to Azure. As a Consulting Sales Manager, Jon Reutinger, has these discussions every day. I sat with Jon to ask what he commonly hears from customers ......(more)

Career Growth

Apply for the 2019 Idera ACE Program - Sharing this before I forget, Idera is taking applications for their 2019 ACE Program. If you’re wanting to do more in the community, this is an interesting opportunity. ...(more)

Azure SQL Managed Instance

Real-time performance monitoring for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance - This article was co-authored by Dimitri Furman and Denzil Ribeiro Reviewed by: Danimir Ljepava, Borko Novakovic, Jovan Popovic, Rajesh Setlem, Mike Weiner Introduction In our ongoing engagements with the SQL DB Managed Instance preview customers a common ......(more)

The easiest way to create Azure VM that can access your Azure SQL Managed Instance - Azure SQL Managed Instance is fully managed and secured SQL Server Database engine hosted in Azure cloud, placed in your private Azure VNet. In order to access your Managed Instance, you need to create VM in your VNet where you will access the instance ......(more)

Azure SQL Database

Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) - As I first mentioned in my blog Microsoft database migration tools, the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) is a PaaS solution that makes it easy to migrate from on-prem/RDS to Azure and one database type to another.  I’ll give a brief overview of ......(more)

[Video] Configuring Geo-Replication to SQL DB - With the hurricane bearing down on the east coast of the United States last week, making sure you have a good disaster recovery plan in place should have been a top priority for you.  If you happen to be using Azure SQL DB, adding geo-replication is ......(more)

Accidentally deleted an Azure SQL DB? - Okay honestly I have done this once. I have deleted Azure SQL Databases and then try and find the quickest way to recover. The Azure portal is actually pretty good when it comes to deleting resources, for example it will … Continue reading ? ...(more)

Azure DevOps

Getting error “unable to parse remote unpack status” when attempting to push to Azure Repo in Azure DevOps - This blog post is about a situation where I went to push my latest local changes to my git repository up in Azure DevOps and got the weirdest error: error: unable to parse remote unpack status: ng refs/heads/.. An error occurred while communicating ......(more)

Azure CosmosDB

Ingesting Your First CSV Into Azure Data Explorer - We've been using the Kusto query language internally for quite a while and over that time, and while I'm not a member of the Data Explorer team, I've helped a number of people get started with the language. Now that Azure Data Explorer is public, there ......(more)

Cosmos DB Emulators can also run in the Cloud - Dev Consultant Julien Oudot demonstrates how to automate the testing of a data layer in ASP.NET Core WEB API with Cosmos DB. The intent of this article is to describe how to automate the testing of a data layer in an ASP.NET Core WEB API relying on ......(more)

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

Lean AI: A 6-Step Guide to Making a Tangible Business Impact as Efficiently as Possible - Click to learn more about author Vinay Seth Mohta. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, organizations are tapping into troves of data to improve decision-making processes in a way that data managers of yesteryear could only dream about. As such, many in ......(more)

Creating Machine Learning Applications using Azure Cognitive Services - You may have come across some of the popular buzzwords going around in the field of computer science such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). As the world of computing is progressing, humans are now prone to delegate many of their tasks ......(more)

Why it’s hard to design fair machine learning models - The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Sharad Goel and Sam Corbett-Davies on the limitations of popular mathematical formalizations of fairness.In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Sharad Goel, assistant professor at Stanford, and his student Sam ......(more)

Applied AI – Using a Bot for Password Reset - Learn AI Team - Rodrigo Souza  The topic today is how to use a bot to optimize processes within a corporate help desk. Lost passwords and Active Directory password resets are still the leading cause of service desk calls. These requests are not only ......(more)

Microsoft AI & ML developer – Video Moderation with Content Moderator - Content moderation is the process of monitoring for possible offensive, undesirable, and risky content. Content Moderator, a Cognitive Services product, combines machine-assisted content moderation APIs and human review tool for images, text, and videos ......(more)

Azure Cognitive Services – Language APIs - In today’s post focusing on Azure Cognitive Analytics, I’ll look at the Language Analytics APIs that are available. These language APIs allow your apps to process natural language with pre-built scripts, evaluate sentiment and learn how to recognize ......(more)

Using Microsoft Azure – Twitter Analysis - Time for a fun post, I have been working on a mini-project using technology from Microsoft Azure to hook into Arsenal FC public twitter feed to analyse what was being said about this great football club. (Yes I support Arsenal) … Continue reading ? ...(more)

Azure Cognitive Services – Search APIs - Throughout this week’s Azure Every Day blog posts, I’ll focus on different APIs available with Azure Cognitive Services. With Azure Cognitive Services you can infuse your apps, websites and bots with intelligent algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand ......(more)

Administration of SQL Server

Extended Events Workbench - A lot of the information about the way that SQL Server is working that can only be provided by Extended Events (XEvents). It is such a versatile system that it can provide a lot more than would otherwise require SQL Trace. If done well, Extended Events ......(more)

PFS corruption after upgrading from SQL Server 2014 - I’m seeing reports from a few people of DBCC CHECKDB reporting PFS corruption after an upgrade from SQL Server 2014 to SQL Server 2016 or later. The symptoms are that you run DBCC CHECKDB after the upgrade and get output similar to this: Msg 8948, Level ......(more)

Backup Checksum Feature in SSMS 18.0 Preview 4 - I was pleasantly surprised to see a new “Backup checksum” checkbox in the Server Properties, Database Settings dialog page (as shown in Figure 1). This was something that I had been asking for for quite awhile, so I appreciate that it has been added ......(more)

SQL Server Diagnostic Information Queries for September 2018 - This month, I have added a separate set of queries for SQL Server 2019. I have also added two new queries to the SQL Server 2012 through SQL Server 2017 sets of queries. I have a T-SQL script that you can use to check whether your instance of SQL Server ......(more)

Database Copy may cause Azure SQL Database to run out of transaction log space - Summary: This article describes how a Copy Database operation may cause the source database to run out of transaction log space. The client applications may then encountered the error 9002: "The transaction log for database 'xxxxx’ is full due to ‘AVAILABILITY_REPLICA'". ...(more)

Extended Events Made Easy: Using XEvent Profiler - In this post we’ll look at how quick and easy it is to use the XEvent Profiler to create an Extended Events (XE) session to replace the most common usage of SQL Server Profiler. Before you start, update your SSMS to a recent version (17.3) or later: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-2017 Now, ......(more)

Cycle SQL Server Error Logs - I saw this again recently and see it too often in environments so wanted to take a second to remind everyone to cycle their error logs on a regular basis. SQL Server keeps error logs and when you reboot or restart SQL Server services the logs are cycled ......(more)