Next week, July 22 and 23, I'll be presenting at Redgate Summit. Summt is our smaller, focused sessions. This one is about the concept of how DevOps, or, more accurately, a DevOps mindset, can enable you to do more with less. The idea that someone will automate themselves out of a job is something I've always found humorous. I say this because, when I first started figuring out how to automate database deployments, I was only actively supporting 1-2 teams of developers. When I finally had a mostly automated deployment methodology, I was supporting 5-7 teams. In short, I didn't have less work because of the automation, I had more. The trick is, you need to engender a mindset that does two fundamental things. First, focus on automation. If you're…
What's the story with AWS RDS and SQL Server deadlocks? I'm approaching AWS RDS like I was taking on a new role at a new organization. Do we have backups in place? Yes, great. Can I test them? Yes. Do they meet our RTO & RPO? Yes. Moving on. What have we got for monitoring? AWS RDS has a good percentage of the fundamentals. Now, it's laid out a little oddly. You have the stuff going through CloudWatch which is largely OS oriented. Then you have enhanced monitoring, which you have to turn on, which covers eight key metrics for SQL Server. Finally, you can enable Performance Insights which gives you metrics on query behaviors (and yeah, any or all of these may be the subject of upcoming blog posts).…
Over the next couple of months, I'll be putting on a number of different sessions teaching about the tools supplied by Microsoft, for free, that can help you when tuning your queries. One of the most important of these tools is Extended Events. A couple of my sessions in the Redgate Community Circle livestream "Built-in Tools Make Query Performance Tuning Easier" will be on Extended Events. My livestreaming starts tomorrow, April 21, at 2pm Eastern. It will be recorded and made available for free. Follow the link for all the details, or, just subscribe to Redgate's YouTube account. I'm also going to be hosting a fundamentals introduction to Extended Events, "The Easy Way to Extended Events." Heck, I'm even going to be hosting a session showing how to use Extended…
In April, I said I was going to start learning Jupyter Notebooks. It's November. Let's get going with your first Jupyter Notebook. A quick aside before we start. I think one of the huge strengths that is going to come out of these things is as a runbook. You can share a notebook with someone, they can run the queries on it against their own systems and return the book, with the results to you. That's going to be extremely useful as a troubleshooting tool, but has all sorts of other functionality as well. I strongly suggest you start learning these things, as I am. Azure Data Studio There are a number of ways to create and consume Jupyter Notebooks, but I want to focus on the functionality around data…
For those who don't know, last week was the PASS Summit. It's an amazing event every year, but this last week, I saw a ton of indications that our peers are spotting the changing technology landscape largely defined by three tools, Docker, Git and DBATools. None of those indications resonated quite as much as this tweet from Kevin Hill: 3 things I can no longer justify ignoring: #dbatools Git and #Docker for my dev SQL work@cl @sqldbawithbeard @Kendra_Little and @unclebiguns @GFritchey, I blame you 🤪😂There’s more but those are top 3— SQL Cyclist (@Kevin3NF) November 9, 2019 There are a million things to learn about in our rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I think this assessment, especially the way it was put, "no longer justify ignoring" really nails some of…
Those my friends are, in my opinion, one of the single most wonderful things on earth, white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. Now, you may not like those. So, picture your own, special, favorite indulgence. Not a common indulgence either. Something truly lovely and special. Something important to you. Got it? Good. Now, I want you to equate that indulgence, whatever it might be, with the fundamental security of your systems. Let's imagine for just a moment, that you're developing a new system using the ElasticSearch database, one of the most popular data management systems on the planet right now. Did you know, by default, the basic and trial versions of ElasticSearch have security disabled? So, probably, if you're in development, you started with a trial version. If you just moved…
I consider myself to be the most responsible for making such a huge deal about the differences between what is labeled as an Estimated Plan and an Actual Plan. I walked it back in the second edition of the Execution Plans book. Hugo and I completely debunked the issue in the third edition of the Execution Plans book. That is the one you should all be referencing now. As I like to joke, the guy who wrote the first two editions of the book was an idiot (and lest anyone take offense, let's be clear, I'm the idiot). Now, I'm trying my best to make this whole issue more clear. Let's talk about the "different" plans you can capture in SQL Server. Estimated Plan This is where you have a…
We're seeing more and more GDPR-style laws coming out from various governments. With the GDPR starting to do enforcement at long last, it's pretty clear that privacy and protection is a growing thing. Add to this the fact that SQL Injection is still an issue along with all the other ways you can get hacked. Let's face it. We have to secure our servers better. SQL Census The Redgate Foundry is pretty much what it sounds like, a place to build tools. Basically, it's where pie-in-the-sky style experimentation takes place at Redgate. That's not to say that we don't also do very down-to-earth experimentation. In fact, for this whole privacy and protection thing, we're working on a number of tools. The one I want to draw your attention to right…
I've posted a number of new videos to the Youtube channel that might be of interest if you're a data professional. First up, I've started migrating my Database Fundamentals posts over to Youtube as SQL Server Fundamentals. The first one is available: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkzj9ZRhbk[/embedyt] Speaking of DBAs, the job is not going away, but it is changing. Find out how to survive the change: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loUwmKQ_Eg4[/embedyt] Would you like to know how the Query Store works? Here's a getting started video: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8rBO9R43c[/embedyt] I also have a good video on how to combine capturing query metrics along with wait statistics using Extended Events: [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYyTSxry03A&t=97s[/embedyt] Wait until you see what Trace Flag 7412 can do for you. It's very cool. [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei2zJwZyRic&t=79s[/embedyt] Finally, if you are interested in attending one of my…
Moving your database development, deployment and management into a DevOps methodology does involve choosing and implementing tools and tooling. Tools are a necessary aspect of DevOps because, one of the fundamentals of implementing a DevOps approach is automation. To automate, you need the right tools. However, tools and automation, while they represent a lot of work, are actually the easy part of the process of moving into DevOps. What's the hard part? Changing how you do things. Change is Hard One of the fundamental questions you need to learn when you start to implement a DevOps approach consists of a single word: Why. "We always manually run a script in staging prior to running it in production." Well, why? Why can't that be automated? Is there a reason that the…