Tech News - Databases

For those companies that can’t yet move to the cloud, have certain workloads that can’t move to the cloud, or have limited to no internet access, Microsoft has options to build your own private on-prem cloud via Azure Stack and Azure Arc. I’ll focus this blog on using these products to host your databases. Azure Stack is an extension of Azure that provides a way to run apps and databases in an on-premises environment and deliver Azure services via three options: Azure Stack Hub: Run your own private, autonomous cloud—connected or disconnected with cloud-native apps using consistent Azure services on-premises. Azure Stack Hub integrated systems are comprised in racks of 4-16 servers built by trusted hardware partners and delivered straight to your datacenter. Azure Stack Hub is built on industry standard hardware and is managed using the same tools you already use for managing Azure subscriptions. As a result, you can apply consistent DevOps processes whether you’re connected to Azure or not. The Azure Stack Hub architecture lets you provide Azure services for remote locations with intermittent connectivity or disconnected from the internet. You can also create hybrid solutions that process data locally in Azure Stack Hub and then aggregate it in Azure for additional processing and analytics. Finally, because Azure Stack Hub is installed on-premises, you can meet specific regulatory or policy requirements with the flexibility of deploying cloud apps on-premises without changing any code. See Azure Stack Hub overview Azure Stack Edge: Get rapid insights with an Azure-managed appliance using compute and hardware-accelerated machine learning at edge locations for your Internet of Things (IoT) and AI workloads. Think of it as a much smaller version of Azure Stack Hub that uses purpose-built hardware-as-a-service such as Pro GPU, Pro FPGA, Pro R, and Mini R. The Mini is designed to work in the harshest environment conditions, supporting scenarios such as tactical edge, humanitarian and emergency response efforts. See Azure Stack Edge documentation Azure Stack HCI (preview): A hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) cluster solution that hosts virtualized Windows and Linux workloads and their storage in a hybrid on-premises environment. Think of it as a virtualization fabric for VM or kubernetes hosting – software only to put on your certified hardware. See Azure Stack HCI solution overview These Azure Stack options are almost all VMs/IaaS, with no PaaS options for data services such as SQL Database (the only data service available is SQL Server in a VM). It is integrated certified hardware and software run by Microsoft, just plug in and go. For support, there is “one throat to choke” as the saying goes. It is a great option if you are disconnected from Azure. It extends Azure management and security to any infrastructure and provides flexibility in deployment of applications, making management more consistent (a single view for on-prem, clouds, and edge). It brings the Azure fabric to your own data center but allows you to use your own security requirements. Microsoft orchestrates the upgrades of hardware, firmware, and software, but you control when those updates happen. Azure Arc is a software only solution that can be deployed on any hardware, including Azure Stack, AWS, or your own hardware. With Azure Arc and Azure Arc-enabled data services (preview) you can deploy Azure SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) and Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale to any of these environments, which requires kubernetes. It can also manage SQL Server in a VM by just installing an agent on the SQL server (see Preview of Azure Arc enabled SQL Server is now available). Any of these databases can then be easily moved from your hardware to Azure down the road. It allows you to extend Azure management across your environments, adopt cloud practices on-premises, and implement Azure security anywhere you choose. This allows for many options to use Azure Arc on Azure Stack or on other platforms (click to expand): Some features about Azure Arc: It can be used to solve for data residency requirements (data sovereignty) It is supported in disconnected and intermittently connected scenarios such as air gapped private data centers, cruise ships that are off the grid for multiple weeks, factory floors that have occasional disconnects due to power outages, etc. Customers can use Azure Data Studio (instead of the Azure Portal) to manage their data estate when operating in a disconnected/intermittent connected mode Could eventually support other products like Azure Synapse Analytics Can use larger hardware solutions and more hardware tiers then what is available in Azure, but have to do your own HA/DR You are not charged if you shut down SQL MI, unlike in Azure, as it’s your hardware, where in Azure the hardware is dedicated to you even if you are not using it With Arc you are managing the hardware, but with Stack Microsoft is managing the hardware Can use modern cloud billing models on-premises for better cost efficiency With Azure Arc enabled SQL Server, you can use the Azure Portal to register and track the inventory of your SQL Server instances across on-premises, edge sites, and multi-cloud in a single view. You can also take advantage of Azure security services, such as Azure Security Center and Azure Sentinel, as well as use the SQL Assessment service Azure Stack hub provides consistent hardware, but if you use your own hardware you have more flexibility and possibly cheaper hardware costs These slides covers the major benefits of Azure Arc and what the architecture looks like: Looking at the differences when you are connected directly vs connected indirectly (i.e. an Arc server is not connected to the Internet so must coordinate with a server that is connected): Here is what an Azure Arc data services architecture looks like: Some of the top use cases we see with customers using Azure Stack and/or Azure Arc: Cloud-to-cloud failover On-prem databases with failover to cloud Easier migration: Deploy locally, then flip a switch to go to cloud This slide provides details on the differences with SQL databases (click to expand): More info: Understanding Azure Arc Enabled SQL Server What is Azure Arc Enabled SQL Managed Instance The post Azure Stack and Azure Arc for data services first appeared on James Serra's Blog. The post Azure Stack and Azure Arc for data services appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

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.

Last week I presented on three separate occasions during what is considered the biggest Microsoft Data Platform conference of the year, the PASS Summit: Full-day pre-conference session Speaker Idol panel discussion 75-minute general session On account of the COVID-19 global pandemic going on right now the conference went virtual, which meant a lot of new-> Continue reading Setting yourself up for online streaming success, PASS Virtual Summit style The post Setting yourself up for online streaming success, PASS Virtual Summit style appeared first on Born SQL. The post Setting yourself up for online streaming success, PASS Virtual Summit style 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 curious. Learn about a new topic or an inspiring idea. I try to learn often. Awhile ago, my daughter had some exposure to welding and wanted to take a class. We looked around and found one at a local shop. We booked it, and a few days ago, we went and spent a few hours welding. A neat experience, I learned a lot, and I think we’ll invest in one soon. I also learned I’m not very good at this and need a lot of practice. The post Daily Coping 18 Nov 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

We’re back! The first EightKB back in July was a real blast. Five expert speakers delivered mind-melting content to over 1000 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 Anthony Nocentino (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 EightKB is back! appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Quick video showing you how to failover your Azure SQL Database between your primary and secondary location. The post [Video] Azure SQL Database – Failing Over (Failover Groups) appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Whether you caught a single session, took a pre-con, or filled your schedule last week with multiple sessions, l’m going to review last week’s PASS Virtual Summit 2020 conference! The week of November 9th to 13th held the annual PASS Summit conference this year. Normally it’s held in Seattle WA, but this year due to COVID-19 it was held this year online on a virtual conference platform. I’m very thankful that they decided to continue with the conference instead of canceling it like so many other events have done this past year. It was certainly different than previous years, but certainly good to continue the conference in whatever venue this year would allow. I was quite fortunate to have presented a pre-conference all day boot camp called Amplify your Virtual SQL Server Performance on Monday November 9th. We spent the entire day with performance and availability topics for virtual enterprise SQL Servers, and I’m really thrilled with the response from the attendees and their line of questions. If any of you who took my precon and have any follow up questions in the future, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let me know. Next, my general session was called 10 Cloudy Questions to Ask Before Migrating Your SQL Servers. The session was the first session as part of the Modernizing with SQL Server Learning Pathway series. Before you can modernize and advance your SQL Server data platform, especially if you’re looking at the cloud, I presented my most important questions that you should have answers to before you embark on your modernization journey. As before, if anybody who attended or watched this after the fact have any follow-up questions, please reach out and let me know and I’ll be happy to answer them. I spent the rest of the week watching in on other people’s sessions and learning as much as I could. I absolutely loved the variety of the sessions and how distributed they were amongst multiple time zones. Given that this is now a global event because of the online nature, it’s great to see the accommodations for people that are not located in North America. If you have not already done so, please fill out your session evaluations. As the speaker, I’m always interested in what worked well and what could have been presented better. Feel free to be critical, but make sure to be constructive at the same time period if you think I was terrible, tell me, but tell me what I can do better or what specifically you didn’t like. All of the speakers do this because we want to become better speakers over time. Any improvements that you can suggest we’re going to take seriously. As a side note, they do have prizes that you can win for filling out your evaluations. Please make sure to do so by Friday November 20th at 5:00 PM eastern Standard Time to be eligible to win the prizes. Overall, the conference exceeded my expectations. I knew with the change of delivery mechanism, it was bound to be different. The in-person nature of these events really adds to the feel and the impact of the conference, as it’s not just the technical sessions that I’m there for. Having that networking time to meet up with longtime friends and make new ones is critical for this community. I had no technical glitches or issues with any of the tools that I was given to do the presentations. The video-based community zone was also a very nice touch so I could see people face to face. Yeah, not being there in person wasn’t the most fun, but the social aspect was still appreciated with the Welcome reception and Birds of a Feather groups. I think the toughest part about attending any conference this year is that work always tends to get in the way of conference activities. When you’re there in person, it’s difficult for people to reach you, so you can focus on the conference. When your remote, work tasks and emergencies always seem to creep up, and it’s difficult to stay focused for an entire day. Thankfully, complimentary streaming for one year is available for all regular sessions at the conference, so I’ll be able to watch the few sessions that I wanted to see but missed at some point over the next 12 months. Like any other conference, there’s always things that could have been done better in hindsight. I’ve got a short list of things that I’ll be sending over to PASS for review. It’s all things that can help the experience. If the event needs to be virtual next year, these are things that I’d like to see to improve the community aspect, such as having the community zone hangout space available all of the hours of the conference each day instead of select blocks of hours. If you have any constructive suggestions for improvement, send them over as part of the event evaluation because I know they are going to review these carefully. I also appreciate the candor that the board presented during the open Q&A sessions with the PASS board. This year’s been quite challenging, and it was comforting to see the openness at which they described the challenges of the year and what they intend to do about them. The amount of pain that accompanies changing a big event from physical to online is really tough, Especially for things like venue and hotel contracts. I applaud their efforts in making these changes as transparent and painless as possible for the speakers, the sponsors, and the attendees. I’d just like to thank all of the PASS board and PASS HQ for all of their hard work to make this event happen. I know it’s been an incredibly challenging year for all of us, especially when this is the primary revenue stream for PASS. I feel the value in the conference, and understand that they still needed to charge something for it while other conferences were going free for the year. I’m glad so many people attended, and I’m looking forward to seeing the evolution of PASS and this conference for 2021. Thank you all for making it to the conference and to take the time to watch this wrap up discussion. If you attended any my sessions or watch them after the fact, thank you very much! Feel free to reach out if anybody has any follow up questions or thoughts, and I’d love to know your opinion on the conference. Everyone stay safe, and hopefully we’ll all be back in person this time next year! The post Virtual PASS Summit 2020 Wrap Up first appeared on Convergence of Data, Cloud, and Infrastructure. The post Virtual PASS Summit 2020 Wrap Up 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.

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.

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 change your speech. When you feel like you can’t do something, add the word “yet”. A number of things I used to do are out of reach for now. In talking with some friends from down under last week at the PASS Virtual Summit, I joked about coming down if they could get me into the country. Australia and New Zealand are locked up against Americans, and for good reason. We don’t seem to be able to control this virus. I was sad, but I should have added a “yet” to the end. I did manage to remember this with my wife. Colorado has restricted gatherings and I had to inform my team that we can’t practice together for now. My wife lamented us competing in upcoming tournaments, saying that we can’t really play. I reminded her this is a “yet.” We’ll find a way to do this again. The post Daily Coping 17 Nov 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

It’s been a while since I worked with compression and the other day I needed to check which of my indexes were compressed and which weren’t. Now, I knew the information wasn’t going to be in sys.tables and I couldn’t find it in sys.indexes or INDEXPROPERTY(). I’ll be honest it had me stumped for a little bit. Until I remembered something! Compression isn’t done at the table or even the index level. It’s done at the partition level. Something important to remember is that every table has at least one entry in sys.indexes, although in the case of a heap it’s just the unindexed table. So in a way you could say that every table has an index. Well every index has at least one partition. If you haven’t deliberately partitioned the index it’s just the whole index. Why would you want to compress just certain partitions? Well, remember that one reason for partitioning is to separate out older, less used, data from newer, more frequently accessed data. You might decide to use page compression, the strongest but slowest compression, on your oldest data to conserve space on data you aren’t going to have to de-compress very often. You might then have a group of data that you access a bit more often where you use row compression, which saves some space and takes a bit less CPU to undo. And on your current/more frequently accessed data you don’t compress the data at all. Anyway, back on point. The system view sys.partitions has the information we are looking for. This query has the table and index names along with the partition information. SELECT o.name, i.name, p.* FROM sys.partitions p JOIN sys.indexes i ON i.object_id = p.object_id AND i.index_id = p.index_id JOIN sys.objects o ON i.object_id = o.object_id The post How do I tell what compression level my tables/indexes are? appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

Have you ever cringed when you received your monthly cloud bill? Does it feel like you’re overpaying for your cloud services, but don’t know how to reduce your monthly cloud spend? In this video, I am revealing the secret to save on cloud costs that vendors won’t tell you. This is a must watch for every CXO that wants to incorporate cloud and save money at the same time. The post The Secret to Saving on Cloud Costs first appeared on Convergence of Data, Cloud, and Infrastructure. The post The Secret to Saving on Cloud Costs appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

If you’re attempting to implement automation in and around your deployments, you’re going to find there is quite a steep learning curve for DevOps and DevOps-style implementations. Since adopting a DevOps-style release cycle does, at least in theory, speed your ability to deliver better code safely, why would it be hard? Why is there a […] The post The Learning Curve for DevOps appeared first on Grant Fritchey. The post The Learning Curve for DevOps 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 out something new about someone you care about. I asked someone recently how they were doing during this tough time. They told me that they hadn’t been able to visit a parent in a retirement facility and only were able to video call with Skype. This surprised me, as the person was younger than I was, and I had assumed their parents would not be in that level of care. Shows what I get for assuming. I felt bad, and know what this is like, though my mother is far enough away that I can’t visit her often. I was supposed to go last month, but illness made me cancel. However, this person has their parent just a few miles away. Heartbreaking. The post Daily Coping 16 Nov 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

(Be sure to checkout the FREE SQLpassion Performance Tuning Training Plan - you get a weekly email packed with all the essential knowledge you need to know about performance tuning on SQL Server.) As we all know the Black Friday approaches quite fast, and therefore I want to offer you a great deal from my side. During the following 2 weeks I will offer you my available Online Trainings with a 60% (!) discounted price: Design, Deploy, and Optimize SQL Server on VMware SQL Server on VMware – Best Practices SQL Server on Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes SQL Server Query Tuning Strategies SQL Server In-Memory Technlogies SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting SQL Server Availability Groups SQL Server Extended Events So, hurry and sign-up for one (or even more) of my Online Trainings! Thanks for your time, -Klaus The post SQLpassion Black Friday Deal 2020 appeared first on SQLServerCentral.