The Bit Bucket

Hi Folks,

We have a whole series of online and on-demand courses coming. The first two of these are available right now.

The good news? The first one is free and the second one has a big introductory discount.

The first course 4 Steps to Faster SQL Server Applications is a short course for developers, new DBAs, and testers, etc. who don’t know anything much about tuning SQL Server applications. It focuses on finding and fixing the most problematic queries, either in terms of index tuning, or removing repetitive queries, all using free tools.

2018-08-10

When I am writing my own code using a .NET (or other) language, I have a great deal of control of how the connection string that my application uses to connect to SQL Server is configured.

In particular, I might need to add another parameter or two.

As a simple example, you might have a multi-subnet Availability Group, spread across a production site and a disaster recovery site. It’s common to then have an Availability Group Listener in both subnets.

2018-08-09

The PRINT statement in SQL Server’s T-SQL language is useful but one of the biggest restrictions with it is the size of the strings that it can print. Where this becomes a big issue is if you are needing to create dynamic SQL statements (which you obviously need to be careful of in the first place) or scripting database objects, and the statements need to be either executed or printed.

2018-08-08

Choosing the right database permission can be hard. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a discussion like this:

I need to let Mary restore truncate one of the tables but I don’t want to give her permission to do it, in case she stuffs it up.

or

I need to let Paul restore this database but I don’t want him to be able to restore other databases, and I’m worried if I give him the permission, he might accidentally do something bad and I’ll be blamed for it.

2018-08-06

Hi Folks, we’re looking forward to doing a number of presentations across New Zealand starting around the end of this month.

Aug 27th (Mon): SQL Server User Group - Wellington (Things I wish Developers knew about SQL Server) Details here

Aug 28th (Tue): Data Management and Analytics Meetup - Wellington (A Comprehensive Look at What’s New in SQL Server 2017 - and ongoing product directions) Details here

Aug 31st (Fri): Pre-conference Day  for SQL Saturday - Auckland (Developing SQL Server Applications that Perform) Register here

2018-08-04

I don’t tend to read all that many books on US politics but I had heard interesting things about A Higher Loyalty - Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey.

I was especially interested to hear this one on Audible, given the author was also the narrator. I really wanted to hear him explain his view on the situation.

Generally, I’d avoid a book like this because I was assuming it would just be a self-apologetic or self-aggrandizing account of recent events. What I found though was very, very different.

2018-08-03

In previous posts, I’ve been talking about how to use snippets in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and how to create your own. There are several types of snippets and one of the special types of snippets that I want to mention are the “surround with” snippets.

If you look at the following block of code:

Imagine that you want to execute the four highlighted lines only when a condition is true. If I hit Ctrl-K and Ctrl-S while they are highlighted, I’m prompted with this:

2018-08-02

You can execute SQL Server Agent jobs from within T-SQL code. The procedure sp_start_job can do that.

That’s all well and good but notice that it doesn’t say “execute job”; it just says “start job”. The command starts the execution of a job but has no interest in when it completes.

Sometimes, you need to be able to start a job and wait for it to complete before taking a following action.

2018-08-01

Just a reminder that as well as the pre-conference day and the keynote, I’ll be presenting my Database on a Diet session at SQL Saturday in Auckland. I regularly work with some pretty sizable databases at tier-one financial (and other) organisations and they all struggle with the size of their databases. It’s easy for the size of a large database to get out of control.

In the example in this session, I’ll  describe the techniques I’ve used to reduce an operating 3.6TB database to just over 500GB, while increasing its performance. The session will include a deep dive into compression and other related techniques within SQL Server.

2018-07-31

Anyone who’s ever traced activity against a SQL Server will have no doubt seen a large number of commands where the procedure sp_reset_connection has been executed. Yet, this command won’t appear anywhere in the source code of the applications that are running.

As an example of why this occurs, one of the most common data access technologies that is used to connect applications to SQL Server is ADO.NET. It has a SqlConnection object that represents a connection that can be opened to a SQL Server instance. In the design of the SqlConnection class, the architects of it were grappling with two big issues:

2018-07-30