The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News

Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge

I started using git with GitHub. I thought their hosted service was fantastic, and have seen quite a few companies using private repos for their internal code, including my employer, Redgate. I see companies from Five Thirty Eight to releasing their data to the MuseScore sheet music software to TensorFlow to Programmer's Proverbs. There are no shortage of useful, inspiring, and helpful repos you can browse. There are also plenty of silly ones, like the 

I have a GitHub folder on all my machines, and that's become the place where I just stick repos. Some of them go to VSTS, some to Bitbucket, but I still always think of GitHub first when writing code. The others work great, and I'm glad we have choice, but I've always been fond of GitHub as a company that opened up a place to share code and data in a way that was somehow more attractive and easier than SoundForce or Codeplex or any other location. Maybe it's the ease of git, but I really liked the site. The GitHub for Windows, not so much, but I don't expect everything a company does to be perfect.

Microsoft is buying the company, and GitHub seems fine with this. As one of the heaviest users of GitHub, Microsoft has been releasing their code on the platform for some time. This seems like there are some synergies here, and this is a great way for Microsoft to continue to open up some of their code and support the development community on all platforms, languages, and environments. Microsoft has said that they'll keep the open source model, though there is no shortage of concerns and complaints. There are also a fair number of jokes. The Linux Foundation isn't upset, which should make some people rethink their concerns.

This is an interesting topic for me, and I brought up concerns over IP with some people inside my company. After all, we compete directly with Microsoft in some places, and we wouldn't them to copy (and rewrite) our code to add to their products. That could dramatically affect our business, but no one worries about that. Decompilers and our own Reflector could be used to understand how algorithms are implemented, and certainly Microsoft has the resources to do this if they want to. They don't, and there are other business and legal protections to prevent this. 

In some sense, the actual code really isn't as important as many of us think. Certainly it's not in SQL Server where our object is readable by whoever controls the instance. That includes your encrypted code, which can be easily rendered readable. I've often thought that the value I provide with my code is that I wrote it, I support it, and I ensure you don't burn way more time doing those things than necessary.

I think for the most part GitHub isn't going to change for me. I'll still post code out there for demos and presentations and even sharing some code with my kid as he learns to program. It will take time for Microsoft to assimilate parts of the company, but overall, I expect that most of the platform will remain the same for a long time, especially if Microsoft can get more enterprise customers to use it for their systems, especially their database code.

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.

Virtualization and Containers

The Evolution of Docker Container Security: Part 1 - Docker container security owes a nod to several different schools of thought about how to group processes together and make them do work, but not easily get out of control. ...(more)

Vendors/3rd Party Products

Why you should automate your release pipeline - As the trend in development shifts toward more agile delivery, and customers clamor for continuous deployment, this model of monolithic code releases begins to strain. Automating your release pipeline can cut down on your release cycle time and alleviate many of the Release Day issues that arise from still trying to manually deploy code....(more)

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for Developers - Phil Factor describes a few common mishaps that everyone working in SSMS will have experienced a couple of times, and how SQL Prompt “Tab Magic” (now more prosaically called Tab Color and Tab History) provides ‘insurance’ against their consequences....(more)

T-SQL

Removing the time element from a datetime - Killing Time – or removing the time element from a datetime Over the course of time, we all collect scripts and routines for helping us do our job. Recently, I ran across two routines that are removing the time element from a datetime data type that ......(more)

Stupid T-SQL Tricks - Presented without comment:CREATE TABLE dbo.[FROM] ([SELECT] INT, [WHERE] INT, [LIKE] INT); GO SELECT [SELECT] FROM [FROM] WHERE [WHERE] LIKE [LIKE]; GO Next up, can you break up a query with spaces? Yep:SELECT * FROM sys . databases; Well ......(more)

T-SQL aside: replace PRINT with RAISERROR - I was minding my own business innocently reading a blog post by Erik Darling, when this tip smacked me in the proverbial forehead. I even learned something that had always bothered me but had been too lazy to investigate further. Tip #4: Know Your Place ......(more)

SQL Server Closure Tables - SQL Server has a couple of different ways to represent hierarchies, but they do not allow storing any additional information that is important to the relationship between objects. In this article, Phil Factor explains how to use closure tables to overcome this deficiency....(more)

Resend an email sent from SQL Server using TSQL - Sometimes emails from SQL Server go missing, especially when you share an inbox with colleagues. On most occasions it doesn’t always matter as the job that generated the email can simply be re ran to produce the email once again, but what about those ......(more)

4 Ways To Define Lookup Values In A Query - Watch this week’s episode on YouTube. Occasionally you may need to create a lookup table of values for a single query.  Building a permanent table of these values is a good option if you need to reuse the values frequently, but for one-off, ad-hoc queries ......(more)

Tools

Cycle Through Your Clipboard History In SSMS - This is my favourite SSMS trick I’ve discovered recently, probably some time towards the end of last year. Basically, when you paste in Management Studio, you have not just the option to paste the last thing you selected and copied, but can cycle back ......(more)

Did you know…you can change the default file encoding for new query on SSMS? - If you have been reading my last blog posts, you know that I’m currently working on a SQL code migration from Firebird to SQL Server. The client provided the scripts with all modules (Stored Procedures, functions, etc) and the steps I'm following (roughly ......(more)

The Lighter Side

With a simple and cheap rocket, Virgin Orbit aims for the extraordinary - Enlarge / A late May view of the Virgin Orbit factory floor showing an essentially complete LauncherOne in the middle ground, lacking only the payload fairing. This booster will be used for captive carry and drop testing. (credit: Virgin Orbit) LONG ......(more)

SpaceX flies its 11th rocket of the year [Updated] - Enlarge / Launch of the OTV-5 mission last September by the Falcon 9 rocket. The first stage is back on the launch pad Sunday for its second flight. (credit: SpaceX) Updated post: Shortly after midnight, local time, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off ......(more)

SQL Server Security

Migrating Symmetric Keys Between SQL 2016 and SQL 2017/Azure - There has been a recent discussion about migrating symmetric keys between instances and version of SQL Server. It doesn't seem to be a widely known process and there have been some changes between versions. Background There are many ways to migrate between ......(more)

SQL Server on Linux

No @@ServerName on Linux - I setup a new instance of SQL Server on Linux some time ago. At the time, the Linux machine didn’t have any Samba running, and no real “name” on the network. As a result, after installing SQL Server I got a NULL when running SELECT @@SERVERNAME. The ......(more)

SQL Server News

Early technical preview of JDBC 6.5.3 for SQL Server released - We have a new early technical preview of the JDBC Driver for SQL Server. Precompiled binaries are available on GitHub and also on Maven Central. Below is a summary of the new additions to the project, changes made, and issues fixed. Added Added a removed ......(more)

Security news and thoughts

Facebook privacy goof makes posts by 14 million users readable to anyone - Facebook disclosed a new privacy blunder on Thursday in a statement that said the site accidentally made the posts of 14 million users public even when they designated the posts to be shared with only a limited number of contacts. The mixup was the result ......(more)

An Example of Deterrence in Cyberspace - In 2016, the US was successfully deterred from attacking Russia in cyberspace because of fears of Russian capabilities against the US. I have two citations for this. The first is from the book Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America ......(more)

Three months later, a mass exploit of powerful Web servers continues - Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes) More than 115,000 websites—many run by major universities, government organizations, and media companies—remained wide open to hacker takeovers because they hadn’t installed critical patches released 10 weeks ago, security ......(more)

The Habituation of Security Warnings - We all know that it happens: when we see a security warning too often -- and without effect -- we start tuning it out. A new paper uses fMRI, eye tracking, and field studies to prove it. EDITED TO ADD (6/6): This blog post summarizes the findings. ...(more)

R Language

Microsoft R Open 3.5.0 now available - Microsoft R Open 3.5.0 is now available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux. This update includes the open-source R 3.5.0 engine, which is a major update with many new capabilities and improvements to R. In particular, it includes a major new framework ......(more)

Product Upgrades and Releases

Azure SQL Data Warehouse SQL Operations Studio Extension Available - In may the engineering team for Azure SQL Data Warehouse announced integration with SQL Operations Studio. Now they have released a preview of an extension that contains pre built dashboards to monitor you Data Warehouse instances! Today you can monitor ......(more)

Apache Pulsar 2.0 Brings Enterprise-Class Scale and Speed to Streaming Data Processing - A new press release states, “Streamlio, the intelligent platform for fast data, today announced availability of Apache Pulsar 2.0, a significant new release of the streaming messaging solution at the core of the Streamlio platform. Building on the proven ......(more)

Released: Public Preview for SQL Server Management Packs Update (7.0.5.0) and SSRS Management Pack Update (7.0.6.0) - We are getting ready to update the SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services Management Packs. Please install and use this public preview and send us your feedback (sqlmpsfeedback@microsoft.com)! We appreciate the time and effort you spend on these ......(more)

First Responder Kit Release: Just When You Think There’s Nothing New Left To Do - T*me f*r An*thr F*rst R*spond*r K*t R*l**s. All joking aside! A big thank you goes out to a few people this go around: @jadarnel27 for not only contributing a bunch of Super Professional T-SQL, but also for writing a web scraping application to compile ......(more)

Product Reviews and Articles

Reducing risk with Smart Recommendations in SQL Census - One of the most prominent subjects of the last few months within organizations in many industries across the globe has been centered around data security. Organizational compliance with regulations surrounding management of data is increasingly imperative. ...(more)

Driving up Database Coding Standards and Productivity with SQL Prompt - Alongside specialists, an IT department needs people who are broadly skilled and adaptable, who can pivot quickly to new projects, slot easily into new teams, and be productive quickly. In this blog post, we will learn about database coding standards ......(more)

PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI

Power BI Report Accessibility Checklist - In many cases, some small changes can go a long way in making your Power BI reports more accessible for users with different abilities. The checklist below lists considerations you should make in your report design to create more inclusive reports. I’ll ......(more)

Power BI Introduction: Working with Power BI Desktop — Part 2 - Microsoft’s Power BI is a comprehensive suite of integrated business intelligence (BI) tools for retrieving, consolidating, ......(more)

Power BI Tutorial | Working with JSON data - In this Power BI Tutorial, Adam shows how you can easily work with JSON data within Power BI. Working with JSON data in Power BI Desktop is one of the best-kept secrets of Power BI. The post Power BI Tutorial | Working with JSON data appeared first on ......(more)

Power BI Custom Visuals Class (Module 106 – Ring Chart MAQ Software) - In this module you will learn how to use the Ring Chart by MAQ Software. The Ring Chart is similar to the native Donut Chart but has many more additional customizations that can be configured. Module 106 – Ring Chart (MAQ Software) Downloads Power ......(more)

Performance Tuning SQL Server

SQL SERVER – How to Know Transaction Isolation Level for Each Session? - During recent, Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check, I had a very interesting scenario. I was hired by a customer to identify their system’s unexpected performance bottlenecks. I do these for a living so I am usually pretty comfortable. However, ......(more)

How Table Variables Mess With Parallelism - This Is A Parallel Query Hi There This Is A Temp Table CREATE TABLE #Posts (OwnerUserId INT); This Is A Parallel Insert Into A Temp Table Sort of asterisk (The Insert isn’t parallel, but the part of the plan leading up to it is) This Is A Table Variable DECLARE ......(more)

What queries are getting blocked? - Monday Grant Fritchey (b/t) put up a great post EXTENDED EVENTS, THE SYSTEM_HEALTH SESSION, AND WAITS that talks about how the system health extended event session pulls, among other things, queries that have to wait for more than 30 seconds for a resource. ...(more)

Does a Query always wait in the SUSPENDED State? - (Be sure to checkout the FREE SQLpassion Performance Tuning Training Plan - you get a weekly email packed with all the essential knowledge you need to know about performance tuning on SQL Server.) In today’s blog posting I want to talk about a very ......(more)

CXCONSUMER wait type – history and what you need to know - I’m a little bit overdue to blog about this new wait type, but I wanted to wait until SQL Server 2016 SP2 was released for a bit and people started seeing this new wait type. History Back in September 2016 I created a Connect item (3102145) to split ......(more)

Clustered Columnstore Index: Massively Parallel Trickle Insert - A traditional scenario of loading data into CCI is a nightly load from one or more data files containing millions of rows. Recommended technique is to load the data with batchsize >= 102400 as explained here https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlserverstorageengine/2014/07/27/clustered-column-store-index-bulk-loading-the-data/. ...(more)

This script reports usage of HEAP tables over a 15 minute period. It reports reads, writes and row counts for the tables... - This script reports usage of HEAP tables over a 15 minute period.It reports reads, writes and row counts for the tables.I wrote it as I found a system exhibiting high values for Performance Counter 'forwarded records/sec'.TSQL : HEAPS and forwarded recordsIF ......(more)

Microsoft News

Microsoft starts outlining its Visual Studio 2019 plans - Microsoft is in the beginning phases of planning for its next Visual Studio release, which will bring more collaboration, repository and AI support. ...(more)

Microsoft Has Sunk Another Data Center: Here’s What You Need to Know - DCK explains the latest milestone in Project Natick, Microsoft’s crazy effort to test underwater data centers. ...(more)

Windows Server 2019 Preview Continues Trend Toward Smaller Containers - By focusing on fonts, Microsoft has been able to find new ways to cut Windows Server Core containers down to size. ...(more)

Microsoft releases the latest update of Analytics Platform System - Microsoft is pleased to announce that the Analytics Platform System (APS) appliance update 7 (AU7) is now generally available. APS is Microsofts scale-out Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) system based on SQL Server for data warehouse specific workloads ......(more)

Microsoft Agrees to Buy Coding Site GitHub for $7.5 Billion - Microsoft expects the deal to close by the end of 2018. The shares were up 0.6 percent to $101.38 at 9:55 a.m. in New York. ...(more)

MDX/DAX

Fun with DAX – Blackjack Game - I thought it might be fun to try something a little different with this blog and use a combination of bookmarks with a little DAX magic to come up with a game that plays a hand of Blackjack.  Power BI and DAX are not the ideal engine to build a game ......(more)

Optimizing IF conditions using variables - This article describes a very common optimization pattern using variables to optimize conditional expressions in DAX. In a previous article, we already shown the importance of using variables to replace multiple instances of the same measure in a DAX ......(more)

Machine Learning

The Impact of Data Quality in the Machine Learning Era - A significant issue in Enterprise Data Management today is Data Quality, because business data requires thorough cleansing and preparation to be used as input to any Analytics or Business Intelligence system. In an era of automated and Self-Service Business ......(more)

Hardware News

Intel Confirms Some Details about 28-Core 5 GHz Demonstration - When Intel demonstrated its 28-core system running at 5 GHz at the Computex 2018 keynote this week, there were many questions surrounding the hardware and what was required in order to showcase this. The presentation was relatively light on details – ......(more)

Corsair's MP300 Entry-Level Consumer NVMe SSD Starts At Just $49 - Early on in Computex, Corsair unveiled the new Corsair Force MP300 NVMe 1.3 TB M.2 SSD. Corsair announced the drive during our flight over, so we learned about it at the company's booth where the drive was prominently on display. The Corsair website ......(more)

AMD Reveals Threadripper 2 : Up to 32 Cores, 250W, X399 Refresh - One of the surprises from AMD’s first year of the newest x86 Zen architecture was the launch of the Threadripper platform. Despite the mainstream Ryzen processors already taking a devastating stab into the high-end desktop market, AMD’s Threadripper ......(more)

Seagate Shows Off 14 TB Exos HDD, Promises Consumer 14 TB Drives in Q4 - Seagate is among many companies that do not announce a new stack of products at every trade show because design-in cycles of modern storage devices are fairly long and the company is more inclined to meet its partner's schedules rather than to rush something ......(more)

Intel Previews M.2 Optane SSD 905P 380GB - During Intel's keynote at Computex 2018, Intel Client Computing Group manager Gregory Bryant offered a brief preview of the upcoming M.2 version of the Optane SSD 905P high-end NVMe SSD. Intel's Optane SSD lineup has been split between the high-performance, ......(more)

Samsung Announces 32GB 10nm-Class DDR4 SoDIMMs For Gaming Laptops - 32GB DDR4 SoDIMMs running at 2,666Mbps with 39% less power consumption to increase the notebook gaming user experience. ...(more)

Toshiba Ships Powerful XS700 External SSD - Toshiba beat the Computex product announcement flood by shipping the new XS700 240GB external SSD early. USB Type-C connectivity for up to 550 MB/s performance. ...(more)

HP's New Omen 15 Could Be the Best Gaming Laptop Under $1,000 - The HP Omen 15 just got a power boost with an Intel 8th Gen processor and Nvidia GeForce Max-Q GPU. ...(more)

Intel's Rumored 40th Anniversary Core i7-8086K Listed With A 5GHz Boost Frequency - Intel's rumored 40th-Anniversary Core i7-8086K processor has popped up at several retail outlets. ...(more)

Intel Displays 512GB Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs - Intel unveiled its Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs that come in three capacities of 128, 256, or 512GB. ...(more)

HA/DR/Always On/Clustering

WSFC Lost Quorum votes due to network problem - Problem:Early in the morning I received emails requesting for support as the applications were failing to connect to one of the production servers that are configured with Always On, I asked for an specific error and the customer sent me this:---------------------------Error ......(more)

SQL Server 2016/2017: Availability group secondary replica redo model and performance - When availability group was initially released with SQL Server 2012, the transaction log redo was handled by a single redo thread for each database in an AG secondary replica. This redo model is also called as serial redo. In SQL Server 2016, the redo ......(more)

ETL/SSIS/ELT

Lookups and If Conditions in Azure Data Factory v2 (ADFv2) - Azure Data Factory v2 (ADFv2) has some significant improvements over v1, and we now consider ADF as a viable platform for most of our cloud based projects. But things aren’t always as straightforward as they could be. I’m sure this will improve over ......(more)

Can’t find a recently deployed SSIS package - Had a developer wander across confused about where the SSIS package he’d just redeployed had gone. No errors when he’d deployed the package to Integration Services, but when he looked at the properties of the package (or at least the one he thought he’d ......(more)

T-SQL JSON Output to Flat File Destination in SSIS - In my last post, I was stymied by a problem in SSIS. My goal was to use a T-SQL statement to generate a set of rows to represent each NHL season since 1917 as JSON and then to store the JSON in a flat file. Specifically, this T-SQL statement: DECLARE ......(more)

DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Why you should automate your release pipeline - Release Day used to mean weekends spent deploying the latest code, database changes, and website content. Release teams would huddle together in war rooms troubleshooting issues, deploying hotfixes, coordinating deployments, testing, fixing, and redeploying ......(more)

Lessons from Building Observability Tools at Netflix - Our mission at Netflix is to deliver joy to our members by providing high-quality content, presented with a delightful experience. We are constantly innovating on our product at a rapid pace in pursuit of this mission. Our innovations span personalized ......(more)

Database Design, Theory and Development

Aim For Database-First Designs - Lukas Eder explains why database-first design patterns tend to work better than code-first design: The real “truth” of your database schema, and the “sovereignty” over it, resides with your database. The database is the only place where the schema is ......(more)

Relationships and the RDM Part 3: Beware the Misconceptions - Note: This is the last part of a three-part re-write of two earlier posts, to bring them into line with McGoveran's formalization and re-interpretation[1] of Codd's true RDM, including his own corrections, refinements and extensions. For an in-depth ......(more)

Data Science

The real value of data requires a holistic view of the end-to-end data pipeline - The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Ashok Srivastava on the emergence of machine learning and AI for enterprise applications.In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Ashok Srivastava, senior vice president and chief data officer at Intuit. He has a ......(more)

California Enlists Data Scientists in Election Monitoring Bid - The aim of the California project is to help local officials pinpoint any “anomalies” in their data, providing “metric-based evaluations” on the integrity of elections. ...(more)

Data Privacy and GDPR

Welcome to the New World of Curating Data, Not Owning it - Click to learn more about author Richard Macaskill. Faced with the new challenges of data protection – and increased levels of oversight – many of us working with SQL Server have come to the same conclusion. Quite simply, the column names and free text ......(more)

How GDPR Requirements Affect AI and Data Collection - GDPR requirements could limit the amount of data that artificial intelligence platforms can learn from, but there may be a security upside. ...(more)

Data Mining/Data Analysis

The Data Analysis Maturity Model – Level One: Data Collection Hygiene - Data Science and Advanced Analytics are umbrella terms that usually deal with predictive or prescriptive analytics. They often involve Reporting, Business Intelligence, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Artificial Intelligence techniques. ...(more)

Conferences, Classes, and Events

Announcing a Very Special #SQLFamily Webcast with Dr. David DeWitt - On Thursday, June 28th, at noon Eastern (see in your local time zone), join us for a very special presentation: SQL Query Optimization. Why is it so hard to get right? The first paper on cost-based query optimization was published in 1979 by Patricia ......(more)

Two Free Sessions Next Week: Fighting Bad Data and Deadlocks - I am excited and honored to be giving two free online sessions next week. Both events are sponsored by the fine folks over at Quest Software. Why is That Data Wrong? How Choosing the Wrong Isolation Level Causes Bad Results Tuesday, June 12, Noon Pacific 24 ......(more)

The June 2018 SQL in the City is coming - The schedule for SQL in the City Streamed has been released, and the theme is Compliant Database DevOps...(more)

SQL and the City Streamed: The June 2018 Edition - I often joke that I wish cloning was perfected so that I could be two places at once. Sometimes, it is hard to decide which opportunity is more important, for example, my niece’s graduation party ended on up the same day as a concert with my favourite ......(more)

24 Hours of PASS (June 2018) - Summit Preview - Which topics can you expect to see at the PASS Summit 2018? Find it out from June 12 to 13, 2018 at the 24 Hours of PASS - Summit 2018 Preview - edition.Register now at this link, thanks to the Sponsors, the 24 Hours of PASS is presented at no cost for ......(more)

SQLSaturday Orlando 2018 Registration is Open - We’ve just opened up registration and the call for speakers for our 12th SQLSaturday here in Orlando. We did #1 back before we numbered them and this year we’re an astounding #801. It’s fun to watch that number keep increasing! The call for speakers ......(more)

Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google , AWS)

Creating, Deploying, and Debugging an ASP.NET Core Application on Azure - As more companies take advantage of the cloud, teams must learn to do the basics in new ways. In this article, Mircea Oprea demonstrates how to migrate an ASP.NET application to Azure and from on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Database. He also discusses how to troubleshoot issues you may find during the migration....(more)

Creating Intelligent Bots Using the Microsoft Bot Framework - Azure, Microsoft's cloud, provides dozens of services to make cloud development fast without the need to worry about infrastructure such as hardware. In this article, Jakub Kaczmarek explains the benefits and challenges of creating a bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework found on Azure. He also walks you through creating a simple bot....(more)

Automatic Shutdown Settings in Azure VMs - This post will discuss the Auto-Shutdown settings in the properties of an Azure virtual machine, how to configure them, and whether you should use this feature or not.     Overview We normally pay for Azure virtual machines on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) ......(more)

Microsoft Azure M-Series VMs Make Room for SAP HANA in-Memory Database - Microsoft announces SAP HANA-certified Azure instances that pack up to 4TB of memory. ...(more)

Backup and Recovery

Generate RESTORE LOG statements - Today, we're going to take a specific, simple example of generating RESTORE LOG statements from a directory list of files, using Powershell and find-and-replace. The post Generate RESTORE LOG statements appeared first on The MidnightDBA Star-Times. ...(more)

Azure SQL Managed Instance

Cross-instance point-in-time restore in Azure SQL Database Managed Instance - Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed SQL Server instance hosted in Microsoft Azure cloud. Besides built-in management operations, Azure SQL Database Managed Instance enables you to perform some custom management actions such as restoring databases ......(more)

Create database on Azure SQL Managed Instance using PowerShell - Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed SQL Server instance hosted in Microsoft Azure cloud that enables you to work with your databases using standard TSQL or PowerShell. In this post you will see how to create your database using PowerShell. Prerequisites In ......(more)

Azure SQL Database

Bring Your Own Key to Azure SQL Database TDE New UI - In a recent post I wrote about a new functionality for Azure SQL Database’s TDE feature: Bring Your Own Key. At the time the only way to bring your own key was through PowerShell and T-SQL. Thankfully, that has changed. A recent update added a UI for ......(more)

Azure Analysis Services

How Much Does Azure Analysis Services Actually Cost? - It might seem strange to write a blog post on how much Azure Analysis Services costs when there is a page on the Microsoft site that very clearly lists all of the SKUs and how much they cost per hour or per month in any currency and Azure region you ......(more)

Analysis Services / BI on the MS Stack

New memory options for Analysis Services - We’re happy to introduce some new memory settings for Azure Analysis Services and SQL Server Analysis Services tabular models. These new settings are primarily for resource governance, and in some cases can speed up data refresh. IsAvailableInMdx The ......(more)

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Its Synchronization - SQL Server Analysis Services (SAAS) serves a broader view of data for analysis so as to make things simpler for business analysts. Implementation of SAAS gives an opportunity to users to ask compound query and convert it into actionable insight where ......(more)

AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services

What's new in Azure for Machine Learning and AI - There were a lot of big announcements at last month's Build conference, and many of them were related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. With my colleague Tim Heuer, we summarized some of the big announcements — and a few you may have missed ......(more)

Administration of SQL Server

SQL Server Diagnostic Information Queries for June 2018 - This month, there are more minor updates to the SQL Server 2012 and newer versions of the queries, primarily in the comments and documentation. I have added some additional columns to many existing queries, and tried to get the newer versions uniformly ......(more)

Does a Query always wait in the SUSPENDED State? - (Be sure to checkout the FREE SQLpassion Performance Tuning Training Plan - you get a weekly email packed with all the essential knowledge you need to know about performance tuning on SQL Server.) In today’s blog posting I want to talk about a very ......(more)

Understanding the Role of SQL Server Agent in SQL Server - SQL Server Agent is a component of Microsoft SQL Server that is responsible to execute & schedule tasks or jobs in SQL Server. It runs as a Windows service and starts automatically when the system boots. It basically performs the backup task, handles ......(more)

SQL SERVER – SQL Server Agent Not Starting – Failed to Initialize SQL Agent Log (Reason: Access is Denied). - My lab machine is my playground. Other than my real-world client’s problem, many blogs have come from my lab machine because I keep on breaking something or another on my server. Once I found that I was unable to start SQL Server Agent service for one ......(more)

Extended Events, the system_health Session, and Waits - I advocate for, use, document, teach, and just downright love, Extended Events. They are so much better than the old Trace Events (aka, Profiler) that it’s sometimes difficult to keep from just gushing. Let’s talk about a common situation that you’re ......(more)

Extended Events, the system_health Session, and Waits - I advocate for, use, document, teach, and just downright love, Extended Events. They are so much better than the old Trace Events (aka, Profiler) that it’s sometimes difficult to keep from just gushing. Let’s talk about a common situation that you’re ......(more)

.NET Related Articles

Writing VS Code Extensions with TypeScript - VS Code is a cross platform lightweight development environment from Microsoft. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. Ed Elliott shows you how to create a VS Code extension using TypeScript in this article....(more)