Impact of CLR Strict Security configuration setting in SQL Server 2017

February 13, 2018 by

Every seasoned SQL Server developer will tell you that no matter how hard you try, there are just operations in SQL Server better implemented elsewhere than relying on native Transact-SQL language (T-SQL). Operations such as performing complex calculations, implementing regular expression checks and accessing external web service applications can easily lead to your SQL Server instance incurring significant performance overhead. Thankfully, through its common language runtime (CLR) feature, SQL Server provides developers with a platform to address some of the inconveniences of native T-SQL by supporting an import of assembly files produced from projects written in. Net programming languages (i.e. C#, VB.NET). I have personally found CLR to be very useful when it comes to splitting string characters into multiple delimited lines.

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How to create charts from SQL Server data using PowerShell

February 8, 2018 by

Introduction

Intended audience

This document is intended for application developers and database administrators who are willing to learn how to generate charts from data stored in Microsoft SQL Server using PowerShell.

Context

In previous article entitled Overview of PowerShell Charting capabilities we’ve seen some components of an assembly called System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization assembly that is part of the .NET Framework and how to load it inside PowerShell.

Now, it’s time to use what we’ve learned so far.

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Everything you wanted to know about SQL Saturday (but were afraid to ask)

February 7, 2018 by

Description

Technical training is an important part of our careers. Meeting professionals, learning about new technologies, and making the most of the time and resources that we have can make a profound difference on the work that we do.

SQLSaturday provides a quality, inexpensive, and fun way to learn and get involved in the SQL Server community. It is a free, full day of technical presentations from experts that will travel from around the world to help make these events a success!

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The history of SQL Server – the evolution of SQL Server features

February 2, 2018 by

Introduction

This article will explain the main features in SQL Server 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, 2008, 2005, 2000, 7, 6.5, 6.0, 4.2, 1.1 and 1.0.

In the past, the first SQL Server versions supported OS/2 (an operative system created by Microsoft and IBM) and Windows.

Now, the new versions of SQL Server (vNext and SQL Server 2017) can be installed in Linux. 15 years ago, it was impossible to think that. Linux and Microsoft were just like oil in water and now, Microsoft loves Linux.

Also, we now enjoy full integration with Azure, Tabular Databases, SSIS, SSAS and more. In this article, we will talk about all these changes and improvements.

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How to install and configure Azure Data Studio for Windows

February 1, 2018 by

Azure Data Studio is free, lightweight database development and operations cross-platform tool for private and commercial usage, that can be installed on Windows, macOS, and Linux for SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Azure Data Studio is built to simplify work of database developers, database administrators, and system administrators. Azure Data Studio boosts your productivity with smart code snippets, keyword completion, IntelliSense, source control integration, the ability to view and save results in CSV, Excel, JSON format, and the capability to organize and manage favorite database connections, etc. The first version of Azure Data Studio was released in November 2017.

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How to develop a K-Means model on Azure Machine Learning Studio

January 30, 2018 by

In this article, we will discuss the k-means algorithm and how can we develop a k-means model on Azure Machine Learning Studio.

Machine learning is an area of ​​artificial intelligence that helps us develop relationships between data and predict the future. There are many secrets that are hidden in the data. To discover these secrets, we need Machine Learning algorithms. Machine learning plays the key role in leveraging existing data to exploit business opportunities.

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Migrating SSRS content with PowerShell

January 29, 2018 by

With a distinct lack of up-to-date, fully featured or built-in options to get Reporting Services content cleanly from A to B, it can often be a challenging task maintaining proper Development and QA environments or even moving reports from a SharePoint integrated installation to a native mode one, and vice versa.

I want to explore the two most efficient methods of bulk-migrating Reporting Services content & also explore other options I’ve used over the years and those that have come and gone.

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How to move SQL database files (MDF and LDF) to another location

January 22, 2018 by

How often you got to the point that for any reason you don’t have enough space on the specific drive to host a database? In case of database development or other tasks outside the production environment, this should not be a problem as a database can be eventually re-created, restored from a backup and set to be hosted on another location. By default, SQL Server stores database files in its installation folder, specifically in the Data folder:

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How to quickly generate a large number of dimension tables for reporting applications

January 19, 2018 by

Description

When building reporting structures, we typically have the need to build fact and dimension tables to support the apps that will consume this data. Sometimes we need to generate large numbers of dimension tables to support application needs, such as in Tableau, Entity Framework, or Power BI.

Creating this schema by hand is time-consuming and error-prone. Automating it can be a way to improve predictability, maintainability, and save a ton of time in the process!

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Understanding SQL Server query plan cache

January 18, 2018 by

Whenever a query is run for the first time in SQL Server, it is compiled and a query plan is generated for the query. Every query requires a query plan before it is actually executed. This query plan is stored in SQL Server query plan cache. This way when that query is run again, SQL Server doesn’t need to create another query plan; rather it uses the cached query plan which improved database performance.

The duration that a query plan stays in the plan cache depends upon how often a query is executed. Query plans that are used more often, stay in the query plan cache for longer durations, and vice-versa.

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Top 8 new (or enhanced) SQL Server 2017 DMVs and DMFs for DBAs

January 17, 2018 by

Dynamic management views (DMVs) and dynamic management functions (DMFs) are system views and system functions that return metadata of the system state. On querying the related system objects, database administrators can understand the internals of SQL Server. It allows us to monitor the performance of the SQL Server instance, and diagnose issues with it.

SQL Server 2017 ships with a number of new and enhanced dynamic management views and dynamic management functions that will help DBAs monitor the health and performance of SQL Server instances. A few existing DMV’s such as sys.dm_os_sys_info and sys.dm_db_file_space_usage have been enhanced. Some have also been newly built and available only for SQL Server 2017.

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Using production data for testing in a post GDPR world

January 15, 2018 by

To SQL Server DBAs who are the shepherds of data in organizations, key GDPR questions, in general, center around whether data will need to be treated differently, safeguarded more etc. and specifically, as it relates to allowing production data to be used in testing.

That will be the focus of this article as we’ll work our way through the details of this regulation as well as various authoritative articles on the subject, to address this key question. Then we’ll look to ways and means to potentially ameliorate our findings to provide alternatives and workarounds if possible.

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How to integrate SQL Server and Azure Machine Learning

January 11, 2018 by

Good, clean and reliable data is important for every company, because well-analyzed data will open new possibilities to success. When we look at successful companies, we see that they’ve analyzed customers, sales, and finance data very well. At this point, a game changer enters: machine learning.

Machine learning

Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence which analyzes data in order to predict future and discover hidden patterns. The output helps us make decisions. Machine learning is widely used in finance, healthcare and marketing.

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Ola Hallengren’s SQL Server Maintenance Solution – Database integrity check

January 10, 2018 by

This is the second article in Ola Hallengren’s SQL Server Maintenance Solution series. It will cover the jobs for database integrity, backup history cleanup and job history cleanup. The installation of Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Solution is covered in the first article in the series: Ola Hallengren’s SQL Server Maintenance Solution – Installation and SQL Server Backup solution

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How to plot a SQL Server 2017 graph database using PowerBI

January 9, 2018 by

In the article How to plot a SQL Server 2017 graph database using SQL Server R, I highlighted the lack of built-in graph data visualisation as one major limitation of the SQL Server 2017 graph database feature. In the same article, I went on to suggest making use of SQL Server R as one workaround that could be utilised in order to successfully plot and visualise diagrams out of SQL Server 2017 graph database objects. However, whilst 3rd party graph database vendors such as Neo4j provide an interactive and hyperlinked graph diagrams that allows you to – amongst other things – easily drilldown and identify node-relationships as indicated in Figure 1, the graph plotted using SQL Server R is not very interactive in fact it is simply a static image file as shown in Figure 2.

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The importance of Python in SQL Server Administration

January 8, 2018 by

Some of my previous articles on Python provided insight of the basics and the usage of Python in SQL Server 2017.

This article is an effort to collect all the missing pieces and try to showcase the importance of using Python programming in SQL Server.

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Get more out of Python on SQL Server 2017

January 5, 2018 by

Introduction

One of the new features announced with SQL Server 2017 is support for the Python language. This is big! In SQL Server 2016, Microsoft announced support for the R language – an open source language ideally suited for statistical analysis and machine learning (ML). Recognizing that many data scientists use Python with ML libraries, the easy-to-learn-hard-to-forget language has now been added to the SQL Server ML suite.

There’s a big difference between R and Python though: R is a domain-specific language while Python is general purpose. That means that the full power of Python is available within SQL Server. This article leaves ML aside for the moment and explores a few of the other possibilities.

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