Category: Tips and Tricks

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Arvind Shyamsundar. Authored by Arvind Shyamsundar (Microsoft)Credits: Prasad Wagle, Srinivasa Babu Valluri, Arun Jayapal, Ranga Bondada, Anand Joseph (members of the Sayint by Zen3 team)Reviewers: Rajesh Setlem, Joe Sack, Dimitri Furman, Denzil Ribeiro (Microsoft) This blog post was inspired our recent work with the Sayint dev team, who are a part of Zen3 Infosolutions. SQLCAT has been working with them in their process of adopting SQL Server 2017. During a recent lab engagement, we found a set of seemingly innocuous query (anti-)patterns which were actually having a significant impact on overall performance. In ... Read More

Feed: Kamran Agayev's Oracle Blog. Posted by Kamran Agayev A. on October 13th, 2017 Dear friends Hope most of you already got my book and started preparing for the OCM exam. Every month I get an email from my readers as well as from those who used my book and passed OCM exam successfully! If you haven’t subscribed to the OCM Newsletter and want to read the previous articles, use the following link:http://www.ocmguide.com/category/ocm-tips-and-tricks/ If you want to get free trial copy of the book in pdf format, use the following address:http://www.ocmguide.com/ If you also want to successfully pass the exam, ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Kun Cheng (SQLCAT). Reviewed by: Dimitri Furman, John Hoang, Mike Weiner, Rajesh Setlem Most people familiar with Azure SQL DB (aka SQL Database) are aware of the firewall setting requirements of SQL DB, which are very important to lock down connections to SQL DB on Azure. Details are documented here. The firewall setting helps restrict inbound connections to clients with specific IP addresses. Note that this refers to the firewall on the Azure SQL DB side. But when the SQL client is running on-premises behind internet gateway/proxy server, the firewall of the gateway/proxy ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Denzil Ribeiro. SQL 2017 bits are generally available to customers today. One of the most notable milestones in the 2017 release is SQL Server on Linux. Setup has been relatively simple for SQL Server on Linux, but often there are questions around unattended install. For SQL Server on Linux, there are several capabilities that are useful in unattended install scenarios: You can specify environment variables prior to the install that are picked up by the install process, to enable customization of SQL Server settings such as TCP port, Data/Log directories, etc. You can ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Rangarajan Srirangam (AzureCAT). Authors: Rangarajan Srirangam, Mandar Inamdar, John HoangReviewers: Murshed Zaman, Sanjay Mishra, Dimitri Furman, Mike Weiner, Kun Cheng Overview You might have worked with enterprise data pipelines using the SQL Server suite of products on-premises, or using virtual machines in the cloud. Now, you can build a similar enterprise data pipeline on Azure, comprised purely of Platform as a Service (PaaS) services. This article discusses data pipelines composed using Azure PaaS services, the main benefits, hybrid pipelines and some best practices. Traditional Enterprise Data Pipeline Enterprise data pipelines based on the ... Read More

Feed: Striving for Optimal Performance. Performance feedback is one of the adaptive query optimizer features introduced in Oracle Database 12c. The aim of this short post isn’t to explain how it works, but to simply warn you about a buggy behavior in its configuration. The parameters that control performance feedback are the following: OPTIMIZER_ADAPTIVE_FEATURES (12.1 only): if set to TRUE (default), performance feedback is enabled. Otherwise, it is disabled. OPTIMIZER_ADAPTIVE_STATISTICS (12.1 with patch 22652097, and 12.2): if set to TRUE, performance feedback is enabled. Otherwise, which is the default, it is disabled. PARALLEL_DEGREE_POLICY (12.1 and 12.2): it has to be ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Dimitri Furman. Reviewed by: John Hoang, Denzil Ribeiro, Rajesh Setlem, Mike Weiner Introduction Instant File Initialization (IFI) is a well-known feature of SQL Server, providing significant performance improvement for operations that require an increase in the size of data files, such as database creation, restore, and file growth. Without IFI enabled, zeroes have to be written into the newly allocated file space, which is a time-consuming size-of-data operation. With IFI enabled, space is allocated to the file, but zeroes are not written. SQL Server documentation provides details on how this feature works, and ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: John P Hoang - AzureCAT. Author: John Hoang Technical Reviewers: Dimitri Furman, Murshed Zaman,Sanjay Mishra Overview This article is one of the several new blogs from the AzureCAT team discussing common customer implementations and proven architecture patterns using SQL DW. In this blog, I will discuss the patterns use by Independent Software Vendor (ISV) on SQL DW. Although the focus is on the ISV workload, the majority of these characteristics should be applicable for common workloads using Azure SQL DW. Since its inception, SQL DW has been very popular with ISV. In addition ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Murshed Zaman_AzureCAT. Reviewed by: John Hoang, Dimitri Furman, Mike Weiner, Sanjay Mishra We often get questions from customers related to Azure SQL DW being a good fit for moving a particular database to the cloud. Some of the typical questions are: I have a database on-premises. I would like to move it into the cloud because that seems to be the future direction. Can I use Azure SQL DW for it? I am running out of storage space on my on-premises system. I would like to move my database to the cloud. Is ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Denzil Ribeiro. Reviewed by: Suresh Kandoth,Rajesh Setlem, Steven Schneider, Mike Weiner, Dimitri Furman When analyzing SQL Server performance related issues, customers often have their tools of choice, which can be a feature within the product, a third-party performance monitoring tool, or a home-grown tool that assists in monitoring live performance. For live monitoring, in the SQLCAT lab we use a home grown tool described in this blog. However, when our customers have a performance issue, we, just like support engineers and consultants, can’t always have them ship their third-party tools or associated data, ... Read More