Category: Tips and Tricks

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Denzil Ribeiro. Reviewed by: Dimitri Furman, Sanjay Mishra, Mike Weiner, Arvind Shyamsundar, Kun Cheng, Suresh Kandoth, John Hoang Background Some of the best practices when bulk inserting into a clustered Columnstore table are: Specifying a batch size close to 1048576 rows, or at least greater than 102400 rows, so that they land into compressed row groups directly. Using concurrent bulk loads if you want to reduce the time to load. For additional details, see the blog post titled Data Loading performance considerations with Clustered Columnstore indexes, specifically the Concurrent Loading section. Customer Scenario ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Arvind Shyamsundar. Authored by Arvind Shyamsundar and Shreya Verma Reviewed by Dimitri Furman, Joe Sack, Sanjay Mishra, Denzil Ribeiro, Mike Weiner, Rajesh Setlem Graphs are a very common way to represent networks and relationships between objects. Historically, it is not easy to represent such data structures in relational databases like SQL Server and Azure SQL DB. To address this requirement, in November 2016 (through a private preview program for a set of early adopter customers) we introduced extensions to which allow us to natively store and query graphs inside the database on Azure ... Read More

Feed: Kamran Agayev's Oracle Blog. Posted by Kamran Agayev A. on April 18th, 2017 Dear reader. You must have already known about my OCM exam Study Guide that I’ve published few months ago. If not, then get your pdf copy of sample chapters of the book from www.ocmguide.com now. With along the sample pdf copy you will also be registered for the weekly OCM exam tips email list! Good luck to you with your exam preparation and feel free to contact me on any questions regarding the exam preparation. I’m ready to help you through it. Check the following link ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Dimitri Furman. The widely popular SQLBits conference will take place April 5-8 2017 in Telford, UK. Several SQLCAT team members will be presenting a number of breakout sessions. Our topics this year are SQL Server on Linux and Azure SQL Database. SQLCAT sessions are unique. We bring in real customer stories, and present their deployments, architectures, challenges, and lessons learned. This year, we will have four sessions at SQLBits: Azure SQL Database best practices in resiliency design, Friday April 7, 11:00. HADR for SQL Server on Linux, Friday April 7, 15:30. Migrating from ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Arvind Shyamsundar. Contributions from, and reviewed by: Ken Van Hyning, David Shiflet, Charles Gagnon and Alan Ren (SSMS dev team), Dimitri Furman, Mike Weiner and Rajesh Setlem (SQLCAT) Background SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is the most popular client used to administer and work with SQL Server and Azure SQL DB. Internally, the SSMS code uses the SqlClient class (implemented in the .NET Framework) to connect to SQL Server. Recent versions of SSMS have been compiled with .NET Framework 4.6.1. What this means is that SSMS gets to leverage many of the newer ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Dimitri Furman. Reviewed by: Pat Schaefer, Rajesh Setlem, Xiaochen Wu, Murshed Zaman All SQL Server versions starting from SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 support Backup to URL, which allows storing SQL Server backups in Azure Blob Storage. In SQL Server 2016, several improvements to Backup to URL were made, including the ability to use block blobs in addition to page blobs, and the ability to create striped backups (if using block blobs). Prior to SQL Server 2016, the maximum backup size was limited to the maximum size of a single page blob, which ... Read More

Feed: Striving for Optimal Performance. This is just a short note to point out that I finally uploaded under the downloadable files of TOP a new version of TVD$XTAT. To download it click here. Not only I introduced some new features, but I also fixed several bugs. The detailed change log since Beta 10 is the following: Added support for bind sets using array processing Added support for client driver (12.1) Added support for container ID (12.1) Added “active” template (JavaScript/jQuery required) Improved “html” and “text” template (including changes in tvdxtat.xsd) Improved processing of recursive statements Improved processing of parse ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Rajesh Setlem. Reviewed by: Steven Schneider, Sanjay Mishra, Mike Weiner, Kun Cheng, Dimitri Furman, Arvind Shyamsundar, Mahesh Unnikrishnan, Luis Carlos Vargas Herring Deploying SQL Server Availability Groups in Azure VMs typically involved provisioning two additional VMs to host an Active Directory Domain Controller. With Azure Active Directory (AAD) Domain Services (aka managed domain services on Azure), it is possible to deploy SQL Server Availability Groups (AG) in Azure, instead of deploying VMs for the AD. AAD Domain Services provides services such as domain join, group policy, LDAP, Kerberos/NTLM authentication that are fully compatible with ... Read More

Feed: Kamran Agayev's Oracle Blog. In the previous blog posts you have seen how to create a disaster recovery for on-premises Oracle Database by creating a standby database in Oracle Cloud. Sometimes, you might not need to create a standby database, but just store the backup of your database in Oracle Cloud Storage and then use it to create a database in the cloud in the feature. In this blog post I will show you how to take backup of on-premises database to Oracle Cloud Storage and use it to perform a disaster recovery by restoring/recovering from backup to the ... Read More

Feed: SQL Server Customer Advisory Team. Author: Dimitri Furman. Written by: Josh Gnanayutham, Program Manager, SQL Engineering Introduction As users are increasingly moving their data to the Azure cloud, migration from SQL Server to Azure SQL Database is a common task. There are many migration methods and they each have their pros and cons. This blog post will explore how to migrate your database using Transaction Replication. It will also cover the limitations. As a prerequisite to this article, we recommend looking at the Azure SQL Database documentation on migration, which summarizes the different options you have. This will help ... Read More