Posts

The March release of Azure Data Studio now supports Jupyter Notebooks with SQL kernels. This is a very interesting feature that opens new possibilities, especially for presentations and for troubleshooting scenarios. For presentations, it is fairly obvious what the use case is: you can prepare notebooks to show in your presentations, with code and results combined in a convenient way. It helps when you have to establish a workflow in your demos that the attendees can repeat at home when they download the demos for your presentation. [Read More]

Last week I showed you how to use WorkloadTools to analyze a workload. As you have seen, using SqlWorkload to extract performance data from your workload is extremely easy and it just takes a few keystrokes in your favorite text editor to craft the perfect .json configuration file. Today I’m going to show you how to capture a workload and save it to a file. If you’ve ever tried to perform this task with any other traditional benchmarking tool, like RML Utilities or Distributed Replay, your palms are probably sweaty already, but fear not: no complicated traces to set up, no hypertrophic scripts to create extended events captures. [Read More]

Last week I introduced WorkloadTools and promised additional posts to describe what it can do in more detail. So, here we go: in this post I will show you how to use WorkloadTools to capture a workload and analyze it, in order to find things like the most resource-intensive queries or discover how the application behaves over time. Capturing the workload First of all, you need to capture the workload using SqlWorkload. [Read More]

If you ever tried to capture a benchmark on your SQL Server, you probably know that it is a complex operation. Not an impossible task, but definitely something that needs to be planned, timed and studied very thoroughly. The main idea is that you capture a workload from production, you extract some performance information, then you replay the same workload to one or more environments that you want to put to test, while capturing the same performance information. [Read More]

I wish I could say that every DBA has a love/hate relationship with Replication, but, let’s face it, it’s only hate. But it could get worse: it could be Merge Replication. Or even worse: Merge Replication with FILESTREAM. What could possibly top all this hatred and despair if not a bug? Well, I happened to find one, that I will describe here. The scenario I published tables with FILESTREAM data before, but it seems like there is a particular planetary alignment that triggers an error during the execution of the snapshot agent. [Read More]

While getting a new workstation is usually nice, reinstalling all your softwares and settings is definitely not the most pleasant thing that comes to my mind. One of the factors that can contribute the most to making the process even less pleasant is working around the corporate proxy. Many applications live on the assumption that nobody uses proxy servers, thus making online repositories inaccessible for new installations and for automatic updates. [Read More]

Let’s face it: column enlargement is a very sensitive topic. I get thousands of emails every month on this particular topic, although most of them end up in my spam folder. Go figure… The inconvenient truth is that enlarging a fixed size column is a long and painful operation, that will make you wish there was a magic lotion or pill to use on your column to enlarge it on the spot. [Read More]

Three years ago, I started to work on a project called ExtendedTsqlCollector. I blogged about it multiple times here on spaghettidba.com. Even if I received positive feedback, I knew that one aspect was slowing down the adoption of the project: the Data Collector. That particular feature of SQL Server has a very bad reputation for being difficult to set up, customize and monitor. ExtendedTSQLCollector tried to address some of those issues, but the damage was already done and I knew that the Data Collector was already on the verge of extinction. [Read More]

If you’re working for a big company, chances are that your IT already has a strategy and tools for dealing with backups. Many objects need to backed up (files, emails, virtual machines, databases…) and vendors are happy to provide software solutions for all those needs. Usually, the first type of object that has to be protected is files: every company, even the smaller ones, have file servers with lots of data that has to be regularly backed up, so the data protection solution found in the majority of companies is typically built around the capabilities and features of backup tools designed and engineered for protecting the file system. [Read More]

Today I was reading William Durkin‘s fine post on Presentation Mode in SSMS vNext when inspiration struck. One of the things that really annoys me when presenting is the transition between slides and demos. Usually, I try to improve the process as much as possible by having the least minimum amount of windows open while presenting, so that I don’t land on the wrong window. Unfortunately, that is not always easy. [Read More]