Tech News - Databases

Last week was the first PASS Virtual Summit. This was the first time that the event wasn’t held in a live setting, and this was the third conference for me this year that I attended virtually. I took some notes during the event, and this is a summary of my impressions. I’ve also submitted this feedback to PASS as an evaluation. Tl; Dr: I give the event a C Overall Things went well, and I was pleased with the way that the Summit was handled Huge kudos to the staff at C&C, who were behind the scenes. I saw a number of their efforts as a speaker, but they managed to run this event well.  Thanks to Cadmium and Falcon Events as well for the mostly smooth operation of the event. I was able to attend sessions, chat, ask questions, and enjoy the week. I didn’t get to a lot of sessions, but since I can watch later, I wasn’t too stressed. I liked the ability to see live sessions together and just pick one to engage in. The moderator and Q&A seemed to work well. The basic event ran well. The bare minimum was there, so I give PASS credit for pulling this off. Pre-Con I attended Meagan Longoria’s pre-con on Monday. I enjoyed it, learned a lot, and got some notes out of it. I do wish I had the chance to re-watch some of it this week, but I also understand the speaker perspective here. There were lots of communications, which was good. One thing I find with many events is that limited communication gets buried in my inbox. It’s nice to get a few reminders the day before and day of to help me remember and figure out how to get into the session. I had to track down credentials, which is fine. I learned to save this separately. I do wish I had a calendar reminder. While I saw 5+ emails that said 11amEST, I kept interpreting that as 11am in my time zone, which is where Meagan lives. As a result, I was late to the event. My fault, but I do think an .ics file might have helped me. I do wish that this were earlier or later, so that I could actually rewatch some of the pre-con. I had other work to do Tues, though I might have done another pre-con in other years, and I had work and some live sessions on Wednesday. It the pre-con were the week before, I would have more time to review or catch something I might have missed. This is still better than a live event, where it’s one shot on one day, but it feels disappointing to me as though I’ve lost something. Grade: A- Schedule While I loved the “live session” list, I wasn’t thrilled with the rest of the schedule. I’m often looking to see what’s on now. I had to scroll down to find the current time, or next time, and then if I looked at a session’s details, the page would often scroll back to the top when I closed the popup. The time zone was also a problem. I deal across time zones constantly, and I’ve learned how to schedule things in different time zones, however, I would get confused at times and forget to subtract 2 hours from EST to get to MST. I do think that not supporting a user, really a per-user, time zone is a large failure. While it would be good to auto-detect browsers, at least let me set a time zone for display. Search worked well, but I’m a browser, and it was hard to find things. I also found the scrolling through the list by time was difficult and the details of the session put me back at the top. I didn’t see many community items, nor did I see the yoga, meditation, and other breaks. Maybe my fault, but not easy to find if it was me. Grade: C Opening Night I went to the opening session, which was the DJ playing tunes. While I enjoyed the music, watching someone spin records isn’t great. The chat was good for a few people that knew each other, but it flew by on my screen. I do think that some separation of chat into channels or some way to allow some interaction here would be good. I’d also prefer some live (or recorded) item on the main stage, with some conversation, some discussion, or something besides the DJ. The chat was live, but it didn’t work well for me, having hundreds of people in one chat session doesn’t scale or work. I also a little disappointed that the bartender session was at the end, and not sometime earlier. Be nice to make a drink early in the session, not later. I don’t know if things changed after 830EST as I went to a music bubble. I hosted one bubble, which were music themed, but no music was provided. Since I have a Yeti mic, I played Spotify with my theme in the background, as I was chatting with a few people. I thought the small, 6-7 people chatting was good, but I also think there’s an opacity here. Someone has to join to see who’s in the room, and if there is any conversation. It’s an awkward time to jump in to see something and have someone then try to engage you when you’re not sure if you want to be there. I wish these were open all week, but with more transparency as to who is in them and organized around some topic. Grade: B Keynotes I enjoyed a couple keynotes, with a few more on my list. I was surprised at the screen quality, without the ability to maximize the live screen and be able to see the screen. Two things here. 1. Presenters need to understand that the attendees see a slightly different view and screen. Please, make things larger in browsers, zoom in, etc. Understand it’s hard to see. It’s something I need to learn to be better at. 2. The tech platforms need to ensure that we can pause, maybe rewind slightly, move backward, and maximize the screen. I also am glad I reviewed my sessions before uploading them as I was really disappointed in the sound quality for Bob and Conor’s demo. Overall, these were what we normally see at a keynote, albeit with some issues with display. Grade: B Sessions There were a few types here. For the live sessions, I thought these mostly went well, albeit, without the ability to easily see the whole screen. I liked being able to ask a question and have a moderator bring this up to the speaker. I do think we might need some practice as speakers with pauses or asking for questions more during session. That isn’t great for recordings, but it would be nice. I ran into one recorded session that was a mess (Ray Kim’s blogging session). Since we pay for content for the year, that needs to be re-recorded, along with others that are broken. I can’t decide what I think about the Q&A and Chat. I don’t like them in the browser window, because that takes up space I could use elsewhere. Really, I preferred the discord server that Jen McCown set up for the event. That was better real time interaction. I also didn’t like that pre-recorded sessions didn’t start at the time. I had to press play, which was odd for me. I brought up a session, left it there and started to answer some email, expecting it to play. It didn’t, and when I started it 10 minutes late, the chat didn’t make sense. If we’re going to have the session at a time, it ought to just play. I can watch the recording later. For the recordings, I can’t maximize them. That feels like an ergonomic fail. I also don’t have a tooltip on the reverse/forward. These are 10sec, which is good, but it would be nice to know. I also wish the chat or Q&A were available, especially the latter. I don’t see a way to access this. Grade: B Networking To me, one of the great things at the PASS Summit is being able to see old friends and meet new ones. This is a big part of the reason why I go, take the time out of schedule, and make a case to my boss. Or in years past, why I paid to go. This was almost non existent. The bubbles on opening night were good. I met 1 new person and saw 5 friends. In one Redgate video chat, and one text chat, I responded to 2 friends, but since I didn’t have times in the chat, I didn’t realize I’d missed that person. After my session, I had 1 friend in a video chat. Outside of that, the Community Zone hours never worked for me. One of the great things in Seattle (or any city) is that the community zone is always open, so I can pop by and see a few people. I can walk between sessions with someone for a minute, or stop in the hallway. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t a good way to do this. On the discord server, I had a few  conversations with people, but it wasn’t great networking. Not something I think is better than catching many of these sessions at a SQL Saturday, UG, or GroupBy. Messaging in the platform was hidden, but more, there just wasn’t an easy way to see someone or know if they were around. I actually had more text conversations with friends on my phone or Twitter than on the platform. The Summit only reminded me of a few people. That’s not nothing, but it’s not necessarily great. Grade: D – this is a big weight in my mind. Security Some big security fails, with passwords, emails, and various other information leaking. That might be fine with some events, but it feels like a problem for me. Disclosure of data isn’t good, and this wasn’t well handled by the platform. Not PASS’ fault, but it is in some sense as they should be cognizant of this and check for it. I can’t tell how much of an issue this was, and I only saw some complaints, but if this leaks stuff, there could be fines there that wipe out profit. This needs to be taken seriously for next year. Grade: D Value I’m torn here. The content worked, I learned things, and I could ask questions. I still can, I guess, as many speakers have their email on the site, or a link to some social media/blog. That’s a portion of what I get. The pre-con was great, and it’s not really much different than in person. I could still get distracted, need to step out, or lose focus. The networking was subpar. The community activities were mostly non-existent, and I felt less energy on Twitter and other places than I have in years past. Some might be me, but this wasn’t great. Ultimately, I think at $599, it’s not bad for the content and the ability to watch it for a year, except Lots of these sessions are being presented at SQL Saturdays, user or virtual groups, and other events. With a lot of other events moving online, is this worth it? Everything is together, and I can search for something like “polybase”, but is this better than Google? Maybe I can assume these speakers do a better job than random videos on the internet, this is curated, and that helps. However, I’m really not sure. There is something here, but it’s hard to judge. Before the event, thinking of maybe interacting with people, I thought $200/day for content and networking wasn’t bad. Now, with networking essentially non-existent (1 new person, 10-12 old ones), I think I’m not sure. Overall Grade: C – I don’t think this was great, but also not horrible. Mostly, meh. The post Thoughts on the 2020 PASS Virtual Summit as an Attendee appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

As a database grows and scales up from a proof of concept to a full-fledged production instance, there are always a variety of growing pains that database administrators and systems administrators will run into. Very often, the engineers on the Crunchy Data support team help support enterprise projects which start out as small, proof of concept systems, and are then promoted to large scale production uses.  As these systems receive increased traffic load beyond their original proof-of-concept sizes, one issue may be observed in the Postgres logs as the following: LOG: checkpoints are occurring too frequently (9 seconds apart) HINT: Consider increasing the configuration parameter "max_wal_size". LOG: checkpoints are occurring too frequently (2 seconds apart) HINT: Consider increasing the configuration parameter "max_wal_size".

Earlier this week I announced the release of a new Power Platform book. While I’m super excited about that book I’m also excited to announce the 2nd edition of the Power BI Quick Start Guide. As you know Power BI is in a constant state of change so this second edition is not only an update but also introduces new topics like Power BI dataflows and several of the new AI features that have been introduced into Power BI. I hope you enjoy this new book, which you can find here! The post Microsoft Power BI Quick Start Guide – Second Edition appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Where Filtering I explored a bit on filtering objects with Go for the AWS SDK v1. Coming from PowerShell, I’m used to a lot of one-liners that do a lot of magic behind the scenes, so Go is both refreshing in it’s clarity, and a bit verbose at times since the language features are more sparse. In PowerShell, you can filter results with a variety of methods, including examples like below (but not limited to) $collection.Where{$_.Value -eq 'foo'} $collection | Where-Object {$_.Value -eq 'foo'} $collection | Where-Object Value -eq 'foo' When exploring the an unmarshalled result in Go, I found it a bit verbose compared to what I was used to, and wondered if there are no “Where” clause helper libraries that cut down on this verbosity, and also still considered idiomatic (Go’s favorite word ??). Scenario Let’s get all the EC2 Image results for a region and match these with all the EC2 instances running. Filter down the results of this to only the ami matching what the EC2 instance is using. In PowerShell this might look like $AmiId = $Images.Where{$_.ImageId -eq $Search}.ImageId. As a newer gopher, this is what I ended up doing,and wondering at my solution. This is without sorting optimization. amiCreateDate, ImageName, err := GetMatchingImage(resp.Images, inst.ImageId) if err != nil { log.Err(err).Msg("failure to find ami") } Then I created a search function to iterate through the images for a match. Yes, there was a lot of logging as I worked through this. // GetMatchingImage will search the ami results for a matching id func GetMatchingImage(imgs []*ec2.Image, search *string) (parsedTime time.Time, imageName string, err error) { layout := time.RFC3339 //"2006-01-02T15:04:05.000Z" log.Debug().Msgf("searching for: %s", *search) // Look up the matching image for _, i := range imgs { log.Trace().Msgf("t %s <--> %s", *i.ImageId, *search) if strings.ToLower(*i.ImageId) == strings.ToLower(*search) { log.Trace().Msgf("t %s == %s", *i.ImageId, *search) p, err := time.Parse(layout, *i.CreationDate) if err != nil { log.Err(err).Msg("failed to parse date from image i.CreationDate") } log.Debug().Str("i.CreationDate", *i.CreationDate).Str("parsedTime", p.String()).Msg("ami-create-date result") return p, *i.Name, nil // break } } return parsedTime, "", errors.New("no matching ami found") } I was impressed with the performance without any optimization of the api calls, and could see that with a proper approach to sorting the image ids I could improve the performance further. However, the verbosity of doing some filtering to find and return the object was surprising, so I wrote this up to get feedback from other gophers and see what other idiomatic approaches are a solid way to filter down matching properties from result set. Is there any library used by many to do this type of filtering, or is my .NET background coloring my perspective with dreams of Linq? #development #golang #tech The post Filtering Results in Go appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

The first EightKB back in July was a real blast. Five expert speakers delivered mind-melting content to over 1,000 attendees! We were honestly blown away by how successful the first event was and we had so much fun putting it on, we thought we’d do it again The next EightKB is going to be on January 27th 2021 and the schedule has just been announced! Once again we have five top-notch speakers delivering the highest quality sessions you can get! Expect a deep dive into the subject matter and demos, demos, demos! Registration is open and it’s completely free! You can sign up for the next EightKB here! We also run a monthly podcast called Mixed Extents where experts from the industry join us to talk about different topics related to SQL Server. They’re all on YouTube or you can listen to the podcasts wherever you get your podcasts! EightKB and Mixed Extents are 100% community driven with no sponsors…so, we’ve launched our own Mixed Extents t-shirts! Any money generated from these t-shirts will be put straight back into the events. EightKB was setup by Andrew Pruski (b|t), Mark Wilkinson (b|t), and myself as we wanted to put on an event that delved into the internals of SQL Server and we’re having great fun doing just that Hope to see you there! The post Announcing EightKB 2021 appeared first on Centino Systems Blog. The post Announcing EightKB 2021 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

The key vault should always be a core component of your Azure design because we can store keys, secrets, certicates thus abstract / hide the true connection string within files. When working with databricks to mount storage to ingest your … Continue reading ? The post Azure Databricks and Azure Key Vault appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

The PASS election slate was released for 2020. The candidates and their statements are:: Hamish Watson (@thehybriddba) Joey D’Antoni (@jdanton) – Community Matters–Why I’m Running for the PASS Board of Directors Jose Rivera –  (@SQLConqueror) – Lori Edwards (@loriedwards)- Matt Gordon (@sqlatspeed) – Why I Am Running for PASS Board Robert Fonseca (@roberto_mct) – Steph Locke (@TheStephLocke) – I’m Running for the PASS Board Not everyone has a statement, though you can read their bios and applications on the PASS Site. PASS is at a turning point in the organization, with the pandemic and the move of their main fundraiser to a virtual event. Across the last two years, I’ve been a member of PASS, a supporter, and a critic with my own thoughts and ideas about the organization. However, I’m not sure where PASS should go. There is a lot of enthusiasm for the organization from some, and no shortage of criticism. I see both sides, but what I’m not sure about is what I want PASS to be or do in the future. I suspect the organization will change, but into what? I’d ask that each of the candidates outline a vision for what PASS should be. Not tactical specifics or complaints, but ideally, what do we want from the organization. What would represent the members and be a great community group? Hopefully we’ll see something before Wednesday, when voting starts. The post What’s Your Vision for PASS? appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. Today’s tip is to be overcome frustration by trying out a new approach. I tend to go with the flow, and I don’t have a lot of frustrations with how my life goes, but I do have some. I’m annoyed that my gym limits class sizes and quite a few people seem to reserve spots and then not show up. However, I’m also grateful I can just go. I’m annoyed that despite months of fairly safe competition and practice in volleyball, with little evidence of transmission from games, that counties have blanketly closed all competitions. I get it, and I know this disease isn’t something to take lightly, but I also know we need to balance that with continuing to live. Our club cancelled full practices, limiting us to 5 athletes and two coaches for skills, no competition. That makes coaching hard, and this is a challenge with keeping a team together. After talking with my assistant, rather getting upset, we decided to donate an extra day of time and split out practices to conform to the limits and work on keeping kids in the gym twice a week, along with a rotation so that different teammates get a chance to see each other. A minor part of my life, but still frustrating. Taking a positive approach and changing up how I work through this has helped cope with the frustration. The post Daily Coping 19 Nov 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I waited a week to write this, letting the experience settle some. Looking back, it wasn’t a terrible experience. Content was findable and as far as I could tell delivered without many issues, which is the main goal of any educational event. Networking felt like an after thought poorly executed, not at all a first class experience (perhaps a better word is opportunity, since it’s up to each attendee how much or little effort they put into networking). The sponsor expo made product information accessible, but it could have been so much more and I’d be surprised if the sponsors end up feeling like it was a success for them. For an event put together on the fly due to Covid and facing the comparisons to a long established physical event, it was…ok. Certainly not a fail. Steve Jones grades the event as a “C”, it’s worth reading his analysis. I would guess that most of the people who paid the $699 for the Summit or the $999 for the week see the lower cost as a fair offset for stuff that didn’t translate well to a virtual event. I’d put myself in that group for this year. If they held the Summit in exactly the same way next year, would I attend again? I think I would, because I value the content and the week of largely focusing on wide ranging learning and a somewhat curated experience. Yet, I think I’d do so a bit grudgingly – it’s what I didn’t get that bothers me; hallways conversations, chats over coffee, dinner with friends I see once a year, the sense of taking a break from work and immersing in career, even time walking around just looking at what each sponsor was focusing on for the year. Tough year, tough challenges, but the event did happen and that’s a good thing. I think both the event and the marketing have to be better in 2021. Lots of challenges there too, not least of which is figuring out if you can improve the way you use the platform (or get it improved) or take the bold leap of trying a different platform with all the risks and pain that comes with that. The post Notes on the PASS 2020 Virtual Summit – Conclusions appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

In my quest to respond to every T-SQL Tuesday since the dawn of the end of 2009, it was only a matter of time before Rob Farley’s name came up. I first met Rob at his 40th birthday party, many (many!) years ago at the PASS Summit. He of course has no recollection of this-> Continue reading T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #003: Relationships The post T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #003: Relationships appeared first on Born SQL. The post T-SQL Tuesday Retrospective #003: Relationships appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. Today’s tip is to get outside and observe the changes in nature around you. I was sick recently. Worn out, tired, and took a few days off. During that time, I was inside, didn’t go out to the store, and really didn’t work very much. I didn’t really go outside for a couple days, which unusual for me. When I felt better, I told my wife I’d help her get a few things done. Walking outside, feeling the change in weather, which has been dramatic a few days this fall in Denver, and seeing animals, was good for the soul. I even took a little video and enjoyed a moment with baby Phoebe. This make most things better The post Daily Coping 6 Nov 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Introduction SQL Server deadlock one of the issues that can be happened in any SQL Server, today in this article I will not explain what is Deadlock and How we can solve it but the main purpose of this article is sharing the scripts I am using it for monitoring this kind of process let … Continue reading Monitoring and Tracking SQL Server Deadlock process The post Monitoring and Tracking SQL Server Deadlock process appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

A while back I was chatting with Shannon Lindsay on Twitter. She shares lots of useful Power BI tips there. She shared her syntax tip of the & operator being used for concatenation and the && operator being used for boolean AND, which reminded me about implicit conversions and blanks in DAX. Before you read the below tweet, see how many of these you can guess correctly: Blank + 5 = ? Blank * 5 = ?5 / Blank = ?0 / Blank = ? In DAX, Blank is converted to 0 in addition and subtraction. And you can also have fun with blanks in DAX: Blank + 5 = 5Blank * 5 = Blank5/Blank = 8Blank/Blank = Blank0/Blank = NaN — Meagan Longoria (@MMarie) September 4, 2020 What about boolean logic? Do you know the result of the following expressions? AND(True(), Blank()) = ? OR(True(), Blank()) = ? AND(False(), Blank()) = ? AND(Blank(), Blank()) = ? You can see the results as well as a few more permutations in the screenshot below. Read the left table as Number1 [operator] Number2, so 5 + Blank = 5. 5 * Blank = Blank. And 5 / Blank = Infinity. Read the right table as Bool1 [operator] Bool2, so True AND Blank = False and True OR Blank = True. Why does this matter? You need to understand the impact of blanks in your data. Do you really want to divide by zero when you are missing data? If you are performing a boolean AND, and your data is blank, are you ok with showing a result of False? Remember that your expression may produce undesired results rather than an error. First, you need to be aware of where it is possible in your data to get a blank input. When you are writing your DAX measures, you may need to handle blanks. DAX offers the IFERROR() function to check if the result of an expression throws an error. There is also an ISBLANK() function that you can use to check for a blank value and a COALESCE() function to provide an alternate value when a blank value is detected. But adding extra logic in your measures may have a performance impact. For example, the DIVIDE() function can handle divide by zero errors for you. But DIVIDE() may be slower than the / operator. The performance difference is dependent on your data and the expression you are writing. Alternatively, you can use an IF statement to check if an input value is greater than zero using the > operand. This can be quicker than checking for blanks or errors using other functions. At the end of the day, producing the correct result is more important than fast performance, but we strive to achieve both. If you have any tips for handling blanks in DAX, please share them in the comments. The post DAX Logic and Blanks appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. Today’s tip is to find a new perspective on a problem you face. I’m struggling with some motivation lately. This is conference season, and even with the pandemic, it seems like I have no shortage of deadlines, but I also seem to be finding lots of content to watch. I find myself constantly inspired by seeing what others are doing with technology. And yet, I am struggling to actually do something. Mostly, while I dabble, I find myself struggling to focus and generate some feeling of accomplishment. Really, I feel like I’m not really getting anywhere with a huge variety of new things happening around me. I’m falling behind. I bet many people feel the same way, but really, I am trying to turn this around. I am learning a few new things, and getting the chance to work with tools, and so I have turned my view. Rather than looking at the large group of things I’m missing, and what percentage I am not working with, I am trying to focus on the thing I am working on, and valuing the skills I do build. The post Daily Coping 4 Nov 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Let’s take a look at how to display Always Encrypted Data in SSRS with a gMSA (Group Managed Service Account). We are mixing some technologies […] The post Always Encrypted Data Displayed in SSRS with a gMSA appeared first on Ryan Adams Blog. The post Always Encrypted Data Displayed in SSRS with a gMSA appeared first on SQLServerCentral.