Prashanth Jayaram

Using transactional data replication to replay and test production loads on a staging server

August 9, 2018 by

Outline

In this article, you’ll see how to simulate production loads on a test server with a “record and replay” type situation using the transaction log, batch scripting, PowerShell and a SQL Server agent job.

We’ll be walking through the scenario in the following steps

  1. Record the production load and write the transactions to disk by generating a timestamped replay script
  2. Create a batch file to automate the task at an interval of every 1 minute
  3. Create a SQL Server agent job to schedule the batch file
  4. Replay the production workload to the target/test database by running a PowerShell script to open and execute the scripts at the same interval as they were created, every 1 minute
  5. Validate the data between the source and the target databases to make sure our job works
  6. Monitor the load with a monitoring tool, solution of your choice
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Istvan Martinka

Dynamic Partitioning in Azure Analysis Services (tabular)

August 6, 2018 by

Objective

The real-life requirement

Disclaimer: I assume dear Reader, that you are more than familiar with the general concept of partitioning and star schema modeling. The intended audience is people who used to be called BI developers in the past (with a good amount of experience), but they have all sorts of different titles nowadays that I can’t keep up with… I won’t provide a full Visual Studio solution that you can download and just run without any changes or configuration, but I will give you code can be used after parameterizing according to your own environment.

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SQLShack

Top SQL Server bloggers of 2018

August 1, 2018 by

We made a collection of the most popular SQL Server bloggers, including a link to each individual blog. The ranking is based on Alexa global score.

If your blog is on this list, you can display the ‘Top blogger’ badge on your blog. Please see the bottom of the page for the instructions on how to display the badge on your website

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL interview questions on database backups, restores and recovery – Part I

July 30, 2018 by

So far, we’ve discussed a lot about database backup-and-restore process. The backup database command is an online database copy of the SQL Server database and restore database command gives an option to test the consistency and integrity of the backup file.

As we all know, the backup database command bound with many database options. Indeed, it facilitates the execution of specific backup database command that meets the business requirement.

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Dejan Sarka

Interview questions and answers about data science, data understanding and preparation

July 27, 2018 by

Q1: In the data science terminology, how do you call the data that you analyze?

In data science, you analyze datasets. Datasets consists of cases, which are the entities you analyze. Cases are described by their variables, which represent the attributes of the entities. The first important question you need to answer when you start a data science project is what exactly is your case. Is this a person, a family, an order? Then you collect all of the knowledge about each case you can get and store this information in the variables.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Database Backup and Restore process in SQL Server – series intro

July 26, 2018 by

It’s a time to turn the corner from “DBA” to “DBA specialist”. This in-depth guide explores the importance of database backup-and-restore features and skills you’ll need to build good backup-and-restore strategies using the available tools and techniques. Along the way, you’ll pick up some interesting insights and most of the concepts of database backup and restore procedures.

Ready to dive-deep into Backup-and-Restore procedures? Let’s go!

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Prashanth Jayaram

SQL interview questions on database backups, restores and recovery – Part II

July 25, 2018 by

In this article, we’ll walk through, some of the refined list of SQL Server backup-and-restore, (or recovery) interview Q&A. Also, it includes the high-level overview and links of the “stairway to backup-and-restore series” articles for detailed information. As you read through the lists of Q&A, you’ll learn most of the features and concepts of Backup-and-Restore operations.

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Timothy Smith

SQL Server – development practices with referenced views

July 24, 2018 by

We’ve recently had production failures because our developers changed an important reference. In this case, we had a view which several procedures and views referenced. A developer made a change to the referenced view by removing columns, which caused several procedures and a view that referenced it to fail. We’re considering whether we should stop this practice, or if there are other ways we can prevent changes to an object that’s being referenced by other objects (in our case, a view).

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server Execution Plans types

July 23, 2018 by

In the previous article, we described, in detail, the different stages that a submitted SQL Server query goes through and how it processed by the SQL Server Relational Engine. The SQL Server Relational Engine generates the Execution Plan and the SQL Server Storage Engine performs the requested data retrieval or modification process. In this article, we will discuss the different types and formats for SQL Server Execution Plans.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Backup and Restore operations with SQL Server 2017 on Docker containers using Azure Data Studio

July 19, 2018 by

In this 18th article of the series, we will discuss the concepts of database backup-and-restore of SQL Server Docker containers using Azure Data Studio. Before proceeding, you need to have Docker engine installed and Azure Data Studio configured on your host machine.

This article covers the following topics:

  1. Overview of Azure Data Studio (ADS)
  2. How to use Azure Data Studio integrated terminal
  3. Definition of Docker containers
  4. Step by step instructions to initiate backup-and-restore of SQL Server 2017 Docker containers using the Azure Data Studio interface
  5. And more…
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Aamir Syed

Use cases for Query Store in SQL Server

July 18, 2018 by

Query store was introduced in SQL Server 2016. It is often referred to as a “flight data recorder” for SQL Server. Its main function is that it captures the history of executed queries as well as certain statistics and execution plans. Furthermore, the data is persistent, unlike the plan cache in which the information is cleared upon a server restart or reboot. You can customize, within Query Store, how much and how long the query store can hold the data.

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Robert Seles

Multiple methods for scheduling a SQL Server backup automatically

July 17, 2018 by

SQL Server backups are an essential part of every good disaster recovery strategy. That is good. But setting up such backups to run effortlessly, is the goal. In this article, we’ll review the types of backups, recommended practices and three different methods for automatically setting up SQL Server backups on a schedule. Note: these solutions can also be used in combination with one another

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Timothy Smith

Useful T-SQL techniques for development in SQL Server

July 17, 2018 by

When we’re developing solutions, we can sometimes forget useful commands we can use in T-SQL that make it convenient to remove data, eliminate objects, or carefully remove data. We look at three of these commands with a few examples of where we might consider using them in development, or in rare production cases. While they may offer us speed and convenience in some cases, we also look at some situations where they may not be the best tool to use.

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Ben Richardson

Identifying Object Dependencies in SQL Server Management Studio

July 16, 2018 by

In relational database systems, objects have different types of relationships with each other. Apart from table relationships (such as one to one, one to many and many to many), objects such as stored procedures, views, custom functions also have dependencies on other objects. It is important to understand object dependencies, particularly if you want to update an object that depends upon other objects.

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Brian Lockwood

Eating the frog: How to create a daily-deliverable sprint burn down graph in Excel

July 12, 2018 by

In the first article I wrote on how to create a SCRUM-based, sprint burn down in Excel, How to create an advanced sprint burn down chart in Excel, I showed how to easily set up a conventional burn-down with effort points as a percent, to create a pretty nice looking burn down chart, just by entering the IDs of each completed PBI on the date that it was finished.

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