In my previous post, I showed how to borrow a snake draft concept from fantasy football, or a packing technique from the shipping industry, to distribute different portions of a workload to run in parallel. In the previous example, we determined a distribution order for databases based on size – though you can rank by … Read more
I recently had a restore job where I needed to split the work up into multiple parallel processes (which I’ll refer to here as “threads”). I wanted to balance the work so that the duration was something significantly less than the sum of the restore times. Imagine a job that loops through and restores each … Read more
Pagination is a technique for limiting output. Think of Google search results, shopping the electronics category on Amazon, or browsing tagged questions on Stack Overflow. Nobody could consume all of the results in a single shot, and no site wants to spend the resources required to present them all to us, so we are offered … Read more
If you haven’t migrated your workloads to a managed database platform yet, you’re probably still relying on SQL Server Agent for various maintenance and other scheduled tasks. Most of the time, these processes just work. But when it’s time to troubleshoot, it can be cumbersome to get to the root of some problems. In this … Read more
One of the first things you learn when working with SQL Server, and other transactional based SQL systems, is that set based operations perform best. If you are querying data, a cursor pulling individual rows doesn’t perform as well as a single query. It doesn’t matter if that cursor is on the client side or … Read more
String manipulation is an inevitable task for developers and data professionals alike. Despite all the best efforts to normalize databases, eventually we are faced with some sort of text-based data stored within a relational database and need to extract detailed information from it. Those of us who have tackled these challenges fully understand how code … Read more
Lately, I’ve seen many people struggling to upgrade their workstation to the latest version of SQL Server. The main source of the problem is usually the web installer/wrapper, which can fail for a variety of reasons that aren’t always made clear by the error messages. Today, I’m going to walk through one way you can … Read more
I was talking with a good friend that has an environment with terabytes of information and to create a homolog or dev environment to him is a pain. He comes to me with a solution : A PowerShell script that gets only the first 1000 lines of each table, creates the inserts and schema files … Read more
It is always an afterthought. New objects are created that start off small and current. New feature development takes over and the recently architected data structures become old news. Over time, data grows and suddenly a previously small table contains millions or billions of rows. Is all that data necessary? How long should it be … Read more
I used to believe this option was something almost absolute: it should be enabled as best practice. I was in some way happy when all my demos for SQL Server 2022 started to fail, and I discovered it was because this option was enabled by default. This weekend I attended a technical session which caught … Read more
My initial goal of documenting and exploring SQL Server Row Level Security (RLS) was to show the basic functionality and focus on a few performance and administrative items. I also wanted to confirm my base assumption that it is very secure. This security makes it useful in many situations to segregate data by user groups, … Read more
In order to test graph structures, I needed a large set of random data. In some ways, this data will resemble the IMDB database I will include later in this chapter, but to make it one, controllable in size and two, random, I created this random dataset. I loaded a set of values for an … Read more
Many years ago, in the company I was working for, one junior DBA started a reindex operation in a SQL Server Standard Edition on the most busy day of the month. Do I need to explain what happened next? It’s easy to use the imagination on this one. What’s the option to solve this? Online … Read more
Many DBA skills transfer when moving to the cloud, but you'll have to make some adjustments in many cases. In this post, Dennes Torres explains one of the differences when setting up Extended Events sessions in Azure SQL Database.… Read more
How to make conditional decisions in a package It may seems strange the lack of a decision task for the control flow. However, there is a work around to allow us achieve the same effect we would have with a “decision task”. The precedence control between tasks can be based on an expression. Building the … Read more
Instant file initialization can speed up database creation, file growth, and restores. Greg Larsen explains how to configure it and how it works.… Read more
Almost every environment now a days need to source data from different source system. Here is how you can establish connection using Attunity Connector from Microsoft SQL Server to Oracle Database from SSIS. This method is extremely fast if you want to land millions and millions of records on the fly from Oracle to SQL Server. … Read more
To be efficient and save money, many organizations are looking at hyperconverged infrastructures for SQL Server. In this article, Robert Sheldon explains what to consider for SQL Server and hyperconvergence.… Read more
