This SQL Server FILETABLE article is the continuation of the SQL Server FILESTREAM series. The SQL Server FILESTREAM feature is available from SQL Server 2008 on. We can store unstructured objects into FILESTREAM container using this feature. SQL Server 2012 introduced a new feature, SQL Server FILETABLE, built on top of the SQL FILESTREAM feature. In this article, we will explore the SQL FILETABLE feature overview and its comparison with SQL FILESTREAM.
Read more »SSIS interview questions
March 11, 2019These SSIS interview questions cover many of the top topics that you will be asked when applying for your next SSIS developer job. Each question has links to articles that cover the topic in depth.
Read more »DevSecOps: Security Testing Around Builds and Shared Information
March 11, 2019One big component of DevSecOps surrounding security testing involves how we build and deploy with shared information access of details that may be valuable to an attacker. In order to understand these risks, we must think like attacker who wants to compromise an environment that is focusing on quickly writing code, building the code, testing it, and deploying it across multiple environments. An attacker’s ultimate target will be the highest environment – often a production environment, but some attackers may target lower environments because they may be able to inject code that is deployed to production. In addition, an attacker may only be trying to learn about how an environment is laid out to attack in other ways, such as using social engineering with key information.
Read more »Configuring a SQL Server AlwaysOn High Availability Group
March 6, 2019In this article, we will learn the step by step configuration of SQL Server AlwaysOn High availability Group for two nodes. Once nodes are added to the cluster group, we will able to use the AlwaysOn feature in the SQL server.
DevSecOps: Developing with Automated Security Testing
March 6, 2019A key component of DevSecOps and identical to running unit tests to validate code after a build, running automated security testing after an application has been deployed (such as automated penetration tests) can provide us with a tool that identifies security risks. As we’ve seen recently, there’s been a growth of many companies experiencing information being compromised and with the development culture of “move fast and break things”, I expect this trend of successful attacks will continue. Before we look at our options for automating this testing, we want to be aware of its limits, evaluate the requirements, and consider common designs that are useful.
Read more »SQL FILESTREAM Compatibility with Database Snapshot, Mirroring, TDE and Log Shipping
March 5, 2019This article is the continuation of the SQL FILESTREAM series.
Read more »Importing Data into SQL Server from Compressed Files
March 5, 2019Introduction
I have seen many organizations receive data from various sources and import into SQL Server. You might receive data in various formats and want to import into SQL Server. We can prepare a ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) process to import data into the SQL Server. In doing so, might receive data in a compressed file, which helps to send data over the network using a ZIP file format because it reduces the file size significantly. If we are receiving a ZIP file to import into SQL Server, we need to unzip it and then only we can import data. We might need to create a ZIP file as well from the existing files.
Read more »Transaction log backups in a SQL FILESTREAM database
March 5, 2019In the continuation of our SQL FILESTREAM article series, we’ll be covering transaction log backups
In SQL Server, we take transaction log backups regularly to have a point-in-time recovery of a database. It is essential to define the backup policy with the combination of full, differential and transaction log backups. A standard configuration of backups for large databases in the production database environment is as follows.
Read more »SQL Server trace flags guide; from -1 to 840
March 4, 2019SQL Server trace flags are configuration handles that can be used to enable or disable a specific SQL Server characteristic or to change a specific SQL Server behavior. It is an advanced SQL Server mechanism that allows drilling down into a hidden and advanced SQL Server features to ensure more effective troubleshooting and debugging, advanced monitoring of SQL Server behavior and diagnosing of performance issues, or turning on and off various SQL Server features
Using Python SQL scripts for Importing Data from Compressed files
March 4, 2019Using Python SQL scripts is a powerful technical combination to help developers and database administrators to do data analytics activities. Python provides many useful modules to perform data computation and processing of data efficiently. We can run Python scripts starting from SQL Server 2017. We can create the ETL solutions to extract data from various sources and insert into SQL Server.
Read more »Importing data from a PDF file in Power BI Desktop
March 1, 2019Power BI Desktop is a useful reporting and analytical tool to represent data in various formats. These presentations help us to quickly understand information and circulate it to stakeholders in a visual fashion.
SSRS Report Builder introduction and tutorial
March 1, 2019The SSRS report builder is a powerful tool for data visualization. In this article, we will take a first step into familiarizing ourselves with the SSRS report builder and we will also demonstrate a very basic SSRS report example. Additionally, we will review the self-service business intelligence approach just because this approach can be implemented through the SSRS report builder very easily.
Read more »SSIS Script component vs derived column
March 1, 2019Introduction
In this article, we will show how to convert dates from dd/mm/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy using the Script component and also derived columns in SSIS. We will also explain when to use a derived column (DC) and when to use the Script Component (SC).
Read more »Temporal Tables in SQL Server
February 28, 2019Temporal tables have been a feature of SQL Server since version 2016. SQL Server professionals have historically had several options to track data change events. The evolution of the data tracking mechanism started with Change tracking (CT), Change Data Capture (CDC) and now Temporal Tables.
Read more »Power BI Desktop Pie Chart Tree
February 27, 2019Power BI Desktop amplifies the value of data. We can connect to multiple data sources and visualize the data interactively. One of the best parts of Power BI Desktop is the custom visual feature. It allows developers to create custom visuals and users can then download these visuals from the marketplace and use it as per the data set requirements. We can prepare reports using Power BI Desktop and share the reports using the Power BI service.
Read more »SQL Server Transaction Log and Recovery Models
February 27, 2019In the previous articles of this series (see TOC at bottom), we discussed the main concept of the SQL Server transaction, the internal architecture of the SQL Server Transaction Log and finally the Virtual Log File and the best practices in managing the VLFs. In this article, we will go through the relationship between the SQL Server Transaction Log and the three database recovery models.
Read more »SQL Server monitoring tools for disk I/O performance
February 26, 2019The goal of this article is to get familiar with SQL Server monitoring tools and identify what some of the most common SQL Server performance problems are.
Read more »Auditing by Reading the SQL Server Transaction Log
February 25, 2019In the previous articles of this series, we discussed the reasons behind auditing the different SQL Server instance and database events, how to audit the SQL Server instance manually and using the Extended Events and Triggers methods. In this article, we will show how to audit your SQL Server instance by reading the content of the SQL Transaction Log file of the user database.
Read more »How to monitor internal data structures of SQL Server In-Memory database objects
February 25, 2019This is the continuation of the previous article SQL Server In-Memory database internal memory structure monitoring. In this article we are going to dissect the details of other components that are available to validate the SQL Server In-Memory objects.
Read more »Getting Started with Subdocuments in Azure Cosmos DB
February 22, 2019As we’ve worked with Azure Cosmos DB, we’ve seen that we can store data within fields and the fields of each document don’t always have to match – though we still want some organization for querying. The fields and values storage becomes useful when working with object-oriented languages as these fields can be keys that we use with values that we extract as properties. For an example, the below PowerShell line creates a JSON document in an object and we can see that we can extract the values of these keys in the JSON object.
Read more »SQL Server FILESTREAM with Change Data Capture
February 22, 2019Sometimes we require tracking data change activity (Insert, update and deletes) in SQL Server tables. SQL Server 2008 introduced Change Data Capture (CDC) to track these changes in the user-defined tables. SQL Server tracks the defined table with a mirrored table with same column structure; however; it adds additional metadata fields to track these changes. We can use table-valued function to access this changed data.
Read more »How to recognize corrupted SQL backup files
February 22, 2019A Database administrator’s key task is to keep the database healthy and available for the users. We are used to taking regular SQL backups depending upon the database criticality and the recovery model. We define the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Recovery Time Objective (RTO) or the database system, and we should be able to recover the database in any scenario to meet the requirement.
SQL Server Reporting Services Architecture and Component Topology
February 21, 2019In this article, we will explore SQL Server Reporting Services (also known as SSRS) architecture and its main components. We will also discuss SSRS extensions and related tasks. Additionally, we will discuss the Report Server and Report Server temporary databases.
Read more »Detecting and Alerting on SQL Server Agent Missed Jobs
February 21, 2019Summary
While alerting on failed SQL Server Agent jobs is straightforward, being notified when a job is missed is not a simple or built-in feature.
Read more »iSCSI, iSCSI Initiator, Quorum Configuration and SQL Server Cluster Installation
February 20, 2019In this article, we will continue our journey to configuring a SQL Server AlwaysOn High availability configuration and failover nodes, by setting up iSCSI including an iSCSI initiator, setting up disk drives on notes, configuring our Quorum and finally installing the SQL Server cluster.
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