| | The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News | | Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge |
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| Now Is a Good Time for Choices The whole world is going through some interesting times. Chances are pretty high that you’re working from home and your principal interaction with others is through virtual means. I know I’m that way as is my company, Redgate Software. It can be challenging or rewarding, depending on how you go about it. What’s even more challenging though are all our virtual interactions, whether through online meetings or social media. That’s why I think this is a time to start making some careful choices. There’s a lot going by online now. Whether we’re talking about your kids school getting cancelled, your job moving to remote work, your favorite event getting cancelled or postponed, or the endless news posts. With all this online content, it’s really easy to make quick, hot takes on just about everything. However, I strongly advise you to make a choice. Stop. Think for just a second. Is the post, tweet, response, forward, whatever, going to help people or hurt people? If it’s going to help, great. If it’s an actually informative, positive, fact-filled post, then, yes, it’s probably needed. Heck, if it’s just simply fun, it’s absolutely needed. If it’s filled with negative emotional content, there’s a great chance that now is absolutely not the time to share it. Let’s make some choices now to ensure that we’re assisting through the current unpleasant situation. Let’s choose the positive outcomes. Let’s choose the supportive approach. Let’s make the choice to not add to people’s woes and problems. For most of you, this is what you’re already doing. However, all of us can slip up. Stop. Think. Then post. We’ll all be better for it. Steve Jones - SSC Editor Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums |
| The Weekly News | | 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. |
| Vendors/3rd Party Products |
| Fourty-six percent of the State of Database DevOps survey respondents advised they are performing some form of deployment automation. This figure has risen year on year as the conversation of DevOps in Database development continues, and the benefits become more apparent. If you are interested in more insight, you can download a copy of the 2020 State of Database DevOps report here. Download now |
| For the last twenty years, the standard practice h... |
| this is my extended version of sp_helpindex sp_hel... |
| In this blog, I would explain the cause and fix of... |
| If you use Automatic Plan Correction, and thus also Query Store, you may wonder how was a plan forced: manually or automatically with APC? The type of forced plan... |
| Of all the things that Extended Events does, I’v... |
| Today I had to remember the steps for using relog. If you’ve never heard of relog, stay with me. It’s a tool for merging PerfMon files, and also... |
| Optimistic Concurrency Control is important for many applications and databases. Let me try to explain what it is without using any fancy technical words. Let’s say you are creating a web application and you have an update page which lets your users to update some type of model in your application. |
| Azure Databricks, Spark and Snowflake |
| Azure Databricks is a core component of the Modern Datawarehouse Architecture. Its features and capabilities can be utilized and adapted to conduct various powerful tasks, based on the mighty Apache Spark platform. In this blog we are going to see how we can connect to Azure Key Vault from Azure Databricks. |
| Over the years, the popularity of Apache Spark at LinkedIn has grown, and users today continue to leverage its unique features for business-critical tasks. Apache Spark allows users to consume datasets using powerful, yet easy-to-use APIs such as the Dataset interface. |
| I have been experiencing a problem for quite a while now in my current environment, in that some of our old builds cannot be deleted. When you attempt to do so it results in the following error: |
| I’m writing about my journey with git, sharing my experiences along the way. The series to date: Azure DevOps, SSIS, and Git Part 0 – Getting Started Azure DevOps,... |
| Microsoft offers several options for moving your S... |
| Career Growth and Certifications |
| A few weeks ago, Microsoft made a significant anno... |
| This is a summary of potential resources for any tech person who is interested in working from home – temporarily or full time. It came about from a twitter... |
| Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS) |
| You can use Amazon FSx for Windows File Server to ... |
| A lot of businesses have begun to incorporate the cloud into their backup processes and most businesses that haven’t done so yet are looking into the process. Using the... |
| Some Microsoft Azure cloud customers in Europe are reporting they are hitting capacity limits are unable to spin up virtual machines in their regions. |
| Every day, more IT organizations decide to move th... |
| Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars |
| Well Covid-19 is a right royal pain in the backsid... |
| You have certainly already heard about the new Eur... |
| The COVID-19 Global Hackathon is an opportunity for builders to create software solutions that drive social impact with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the... |
| Free webinar - Date and time: Tuesday March 31, 4-5pm BST / 10-11am Central - The role of the DBA is evolving, with automated builds, cloud and DevOps being the new A,B,C,Ds in the day to day management of databases, you need to up-skill and learn about Database Reliability Engineering. |
| Join us from April 1st – 3rd for Redgate Streamed, which brings together world class industry speakers, technical content and opportunities to network with your peers. |
| Do you have that one PowerShell command you use constantly? If that command has parameters, you have to manually specify the parameter values every time. If you find yourself... |
| Data Privacy, Compliance, and GDPR |
| There’s a really simple conundrum that we go thr... |
| Line graphs (or line charts) are best when you want to show how the value of something changes over time, or compare how several things change over time relative to each other. Whenever you hear that key phrase “over time,” that’s your clue to consider using a line graph for your data. |
| Times are stressful right now. There is an ongoing... |
| DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) |
| I sincerely believe the key to your future as a DBA is your ability to automate everything you do. However, the single hardest thing that you have to do... The... |
| I love this quote from Kevin Hill (and not because he mentions me): 3 things I can no longer justify ignoring: #dbatools Git and #Docker for my dev SQL work@cl@sqldbawithbeard@Kendra_Little and @unclebiguns@GFritchey, I blame you... The... |
| Despite some humorous examples of deployments gone wrong, failures are not funny. William Brewer explains why staging is so important and how it can help avoid the types of disasters he recalls in this article. |
| Database DevOps is essential for DataOps. In the end, Database DevOps means accurate and consistent data which is critical for analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. |
| ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory/Biml |
| I did a thing – actually a couple things – that I’ve been dreaming about for a while. In a couple recent blog posts – SSIS Catalog Compare Enterprise... |
| (2020-Mar-26) There are two ways to create data flows in Azure Data Factory (ADF): regular data flows also known as "Mapping Data Flows" and Power Query based data flows also... The... |
| HA/DR/Always On/Clustering |
| My Pluralsight course for new SQL Server DBAs Image credit to Jeff (t) Back in June of 2019, I published this YouTube video covering the highlights of the various... |
| Greenliant revealed on Wednesday that it has started shipments of its new industrial-grade ArmourDrive M.2 SSDs. The enhanced-durability drives are rated to operate in a much wider range of... |
| One of the world's largest DRAM memory manufacture... |
| In a second SSD snafu in as many years, Dell and H... |
| This article describes how to control format strings in calculation groups. Before starting, we suggest you read the previous articles in this series. Each calculation item can change the... |
| Slack may be adding yet another Microsoft integrat... |
| Microsoft is prioritizing its Windows update focus on security updates and is temporarily ceasing its optional Windows 10 cumulative updates starting in May. |
| Performance Tuning SQL Server |
| Let me share today some of the Free Performance Tu... |
| Question: What is the Difference Between sql_handl... |
| There are many methods available for optimizing the performance of SQL Server. One method in particular is examining your plan cache, looking for query plan warnings. Plan warnings include... |
| Erin Stellato walks through her multi-step approach to index tuning, with thorough explanations and simple but clever visualizations. The post An approach to index tuning – Part 1 appeared first... |
| Is It Really So Strange? … |
| PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI |
| In this short blog, I am going to show how amazing the text recognizer works in Power Apps and AI Builder. |
| I recently published a new blog post on SQLBI. You... |
| Power BI buttons got a little more power! Navigati... |
| Are your Power BI Aggregations not matching? Setti... |
| Inspired by a conversation we recently had with our COO, my colleague (and Microsoft MVP), David Eldersveld, tweeted a question. “What is the TOP reason you use Power BI... |
| Let's dig into the Power BI gateway and Single Sig... |
| In this month’s (October 2019) release of Power BI Desktop, they have added a ton of cool stuff, you can read all about it via the Power BI Blog. ... |
| Product Reviews and Articles |
| On March 2, DBTA announced PASS, the Professional Association for SQL Server, as the winner of its inaugural Database DevOps Innovation Award. Redgate is extremely pleased with the news... |
| SQL Monitor 10.0.5 now supports a user role called "Reports user". A user added to this role, by an administrator, will be able to 'self-serve' SQL Monitor reports but... |
| Product Upgrades and Releases |
| In the immortal words of “Orange” Julius Caesar as written by Shake’s peer, “Beware the bugs of March.” It took us 2,064 years, but we’ve finally fixed those bugs,... |
| I am glad to announce that we just released an additional module about Calculation Groups to the Mastering DAX video course. All current students of the video course will... |
| Pi is 3.14159 to 5 decimal places.To work out Pi, we will be using Leibniz’s formula:X = 4 – 4/3 + 4/5 – 4/7 + 4/9 – …This series... |
| Words: 653 Time to read: ~ 3 minutes. Same Trap, Different Language I’ve been trying to improve my knowledge of Python for the past while. I’ve fallen into the... |
| There's no patch available now. Here's what to do ... |
| Microsoft said on Monday that it is aware of an unpatched vulnerability in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library that is actively being exploited by hackers. The post Microsoft Issues... |
| DotNet developers, if you’re using the System.Data.SqlClient, stop. Move over to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient now. It’s easy to do, well, it’s relatively easy to say that. The actual work isn’t that... The... |
| I mentioned in earlier posts that there's no standard way to write dates, so we end up having to write them as strings. Now that was a real problem... |
| It’s amazing the things that SQL can do these da... |
| TL;DR; You probably don’t know what you’re goi... |
| Microsoft introduced several features called Intelligent Query Processing for SQL Server in 2017 and 2019 that can improve performance without making changes to code. In this article, Greg Larsen demonstrates the feature Batch Mode on Rowstore. |
| Folding@home has announced that cumulative compute... |
| Download speeds fell at least slightly in 88 of 20... |
| Verizon, AT&T waive mobile fees if you tell th... |
| Slower growth likely as attention shifts and pande... |
| “This is another critical piece of our plan to r... |
| The mid-engined Valhalla is due in 2022, but Bond ... |
| I’ve started to add a daily coping tip to the SQ... |
| A consumer behavior researcher explains why toilet... |
| I remember it really clearly. In the mid 1990s, long, long before I went into IT as a career, I was working at a photo studio in Muskegon, Michigan.... |
| Situational awareness before GPS and computers was... |
| So I’m busy working on my new dbaSecurityScan mo... |
| I haven’t been a big fan of dark mode in many to... |
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