Azure-Sql-Db

A while back I wanted to do some testing of Azure Database for PostgreSQL and I needed a database to work with. So I thought I’d try to migrate a basic WideWorldImporters database across to PostgreSQL.

I wrote scripts to do the main migration but then decided that I wanted to change the names of the columns.  While a large number of people use PascalCased names in SQL Server, it’s really, really common to use snake_cased names in PostgreSQL. Object names in PostgreSQL are also limited to 63 characters. I needed to alter these names while generating the scripts and I didn’t want to do that manually.

2019-05-08

While doing my consulting work, I often come across Foreign Keys and Check Constraints that are not trusted. What this means is that either:

• They were created without checking existing data
• They were disabled for a period and re-enabled without re-checking the existing data

I like to see this fixed whenever possible. To make that easy, in our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added two stored procedures to help: RetrustForeignKeys and RetrustCheckConstraints.

2019-05-01

When I’m writing utility scripts for SQL Server, I often need to make decisions or report on, details of the operating system that I’m running on. Unfortunately, SQL Server doesn’t have views that return this sort of information.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a series of views to help.

OperatingSystemConfiguration has details of OperatingSystemRelease, OperatingSystemName, ServicePackLevel, OperatingSystemSKU, OperatingSystemSKUName, and LanguageName.

OperatingSystemVersions has details of OS_Family, OS_Version, and OS_Name.

2019-04-24

I can’t tell you over the years how many times I’ve gone searching for details of a SQL Server build and/or related knowlegebase article. There are some sites that provide much of this, but I’d like to have it in a programmatic form. I can easily then use it in utilities and in my SQL scripts.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we added a view and a number of functions to help with this. The primary one is a view called SQLServerProductVersions.

2019-04-17

If there is a reasonable number of tables in a SQL Server database, and I’ve also got foreign keys linking them, it can be difficult to work out the order of the dependencies. That’s a hassle when I want to load data, and for other admin functions that I might need to perform. So we’ve fixed that.

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, there’s a stored procedure called CalculateTableLoadingOrder.

2019-04-10

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we have a large number of useful functions. The topic for today is two simple ones: StartOfMonth and EndOfMonth.

SQL Server 2012 added a function EOMONTH. It returns the end of the month date for any given date. I really, really don’t like abbreviations like this. There is no need to save three characters.

I asked why it wasn’t ENDOFMONTH but was told that EOMONTH was the name of the function in Excel. It’s sad to think that’s the guiding principle for T-SQL function names. I also don’t get why sometimes the words in the names are separated by underscores, and other times they aren’t. Surely END_OF_MONTH would be more readable.

2019-04-03

Blocking is a popular topic in SQL Server. Users are often trying to work out what’s blocking what. In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we have a tool to make that very easy to see. It’s called ShowCurrentBlocking.

ShowCurrentBlocking takes one following parameter:

@DatabaseName (sysname) is the database to report on

It returns two sets of data.

The first rowset is a list of all objects that are currently blocked, and the last query that was run on the connection for each of those objects.

2019-03-28

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, we have a number of functions and procedures that help you work with tables and indexes. One question that often arises is about how big tables are. Our tool ListUserTableSizes helps with that.

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has a report that shows you user table sizes, but people often want a list of sizes that they can get programmatically, perhaps for a monitoring tool, or some sort of automation.

2019-03-20

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, a number of the string formatting functions have been quite popular, and we keep getting requests for even more.

Today’s post highlights another two of these. TrainCase is words with the first letters capitalized, then separated by underscores. KebabCase has dashes as separators. It’s named because it looks like a kebab.

You can see them (and some others) in action in the main image above, and in this video:

2019-03-13

In our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, a number of the string formatting functions have been quite popular, and we keep getting requests for even more.

Today’s post highlights two of these. Screaming Snake Case is words in capitals separated by underscores. Sponge Bob Snake Case has underscore separated words (hence the “snake case” part) with alternating capitals. (It’s just for fun).

You can see them (and some others) in action in the main image above, and in this video:

2019-03-06