Sifiso Ndlovu

New Excel slicer feature for report users in Office 2016

May 9, 2016 by

Whilst researching for the article Report filtering: Excel slicers vs SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) parameters, I discovered a new Excel Slicer feature in Microsoft Office 2016 that allows users to select/deselect multiple items without having to hold down the control (Ctrl) keyboard key. For some people, this may not be a sufficient reason to upgrade to Office 2016 but for developers of business intelligence (BI) solutions, this new feature further enhances the experience of consumers of BI solutions.

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Timothy Smith

How to build better alerting

May 4, 2016 by

Background

One of the most popular complaints from developers to DBAs involves alerting, whether from third party tools or alerting built by other developers or DBAs in the environment. Building or using alerts for important applications, data layers, or processes within a SQL Server environment offer everyone benefits, but can become noisy if they’re architected poorly, or the purpose isn’t considered. In this article, we look at considerations for building effective alerts that tell us when something is wrong without creating situations where we learn to disregard them. We want to make sure that we respond when we need to, and not always be on high alert when there is no issue.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server 2014 Columnstore index

April 29, 2016 by

By default, SQL Server stores data logically in the tables as rows and columns, which appear in the result grid while retrieving data from any table and physically in the disk in the row-store format inside the data pages. A new data store mechanism introduced in SQL Server 2012, based on xVelocity in-memory technology, in which the data is stored in the column-store data format. This data store mechanism called the Columnstore index.

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Ahmad Yaseen

How to copy tables from one database to another in SQL Server

April 29, 2016 by

In some cases, as a DBA, you are requested to copy the schema and the content of specific tables from a database to another one in the same instance or in a different SQL instance, such as copying specific tables from a production database to a DEV one for testing or troubleshooting purposes.

SQL Server offers a lot of methods that can be used to perform table’s data and schema copy process. In order to go through each one of these methods, we will consider the below scenario:

  • The hosting SQL Server: localhost.
  • Both databases hosted in the same SQL Server 2017 instance
  • The source database: AdventureWorks2018
  • The destination database: SQLShackDemo
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Sifiso Ndlovu

Meaning of the 5127 database snapshot error code

April 15, 2016 by

Long before I turned to Data Warehousing and OLTP replica environments such as Operational Data Stores as a form of data redundancy strategies, I had been using database snapshots. During that time, the analytics and reporting teams were directed towards a database snapshot as a data source for their development. Another benefit of having a database snapshot, is the ease of knowing that should unintended changes be committed in source, you could easily revert the operation by restoring source database off the snapshot.

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Daniel Calbimonte

The new elastic databases in Azure

April 12, 2016 by

Introduction

The elastic database is a new feature offered for SQL Azure Databases. Elastic databases are useful when you have several databases and you want to monitor and manage all the databases at the same time. To do this, a pool is required. The pool allows handling several databases at the same time.

In this chapter, we will learn how to create the pool and add SQL Azure Databases to it.

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Shawn Melton

SSIS and PowerShell – Execute process task

April 11, 2016 by

Introduction

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and PowerShell (PS) together offer a plethora of opportunities, and some shortcuts when having to import, export, or at times moving data. I have come across packages that contain a Script Task with lines and lines of C# code that, done with PowerShell, could make maintaining that package much easier. Overall, the most common thing I see Script Task doing is accessing the file system or doing some manipulation on a file. One thing I hope that picks up speed in the BI world of SSIS is utilizing PowerShell for these type of actions. This is not to say one is better than the other as you should pick what is best in your eyes, but when I can do operations against the file system with a one-liner in PowerShell it is just easier to maintain that in the package. In this article I will go over how you can use the most common task utilized for executing PowerShell code in an SSIS package: Execute Process Task.

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Jefferson Elias

How to take advantage of the SQL Server’s transaction log?

April 11, 2016 by

Introduction

SQL Server keeps track of all database modifications and every database transaction. This is done in a file called the transaction log or TLOG. This transaction log is particular to a SQL Server database and there is, at least, one transaction log per SQL Server database.

As explained on MSDN, the transaction log is a critical component of the database and, if there is a system failure, the transaction log might be required to bring your database back to a consistent state. The transaction log should never be deleted or moved unless you fully understand the ramifications of doing this.

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Shawn Melton

Perform volume maintenance tasks security policy

April 4, 2016 by

Introduction

You may see it more commonly referenced as Database Instance File Initialization (DIFI). If you are not familiar with the file initialization, this is the process SQL Server has to go through when it is creating the data files for a given database, and also during an expansion event (either manually or from auto growth) for a database. It only pertains to the data file(s) of the database, as log files are not affected by this security policy. SQL Server will “zero out” the file, basically fill it up with a bunch of zeros to allocate the amount of space requested. If you are a new DBA, this configuration actually goes all the way back to SQL Server 2005.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

TFS tools for managing SQL Server development

March 29, 2016 by

In today’s world of DevOps and ALM practices, there is often a strong emphasis on the visibility and traceability of the work we perform towards software development. This means that as developers, we often have to account (to clients, business owners, project teams etc.) for a list of development tasks that will be undertaken to deliver a given project requirement or user story. Amidst several tools that can be used to facilitate such a practice, Team Foundation Server (TFS) is one such tool that can be used by developers to keep track of their work items.

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Ahmad Yaseen

SQL Server indexed views

March 17, 2016 by

SQL Server Views are virtual tables that are used to retrieve a set of data from one or more tables. The view’s data is not stored in the database, but the real retrieval of data is from the source tables. When you call the view, the source table’s definition is substituted in the main query and the execution will be like reading from these tables directly.

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Sifiso Ndlovu

Working with ragged right formatted files in SSIS

March 16, 2016 by

In the world of SSIS development architecture, preference should be given to extracting data from flat files instead of non-Microsoft relational databases. This is because you often don’t have to worry about driver support and compatibility issues in your SSIS development/server machine that is often attributed to non-Microsoft database vendors. In fact, I’ve been in several situations whereby we cannot upgrade to another version of SSIS (i.e. BIDS to SSDT) due to the lack of external vendor driver compatibility issues in the newer versions of SSIS.

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