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…
Not really, but sort of. The beauty of containers, at least in a dev/test environment, is the ability to spin them up while you need them and then throw them away when you're done. Containers give you a bunch of functionality not otherwise available through a VM. However, once you've spun up a container, they're so dull. Why Are Containers Boring Grant? I'm so glad you asked. Last week I was presenting at SQLIntersection (great show, you should consider attending). I was talking about Query Store in SQL Server 2019. One person in the audience asked, "Can Query Store run inside a container?" I responded, "Great question, let's check." I then switched over to VS code to show this: docker run ` --name DemoSharedVol ` -p 1460:1433 ` -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y"…
In the previous two posts on containers I showed how use Docker commands to get an image and create a container. This time, we're going to create a container again, but, we're also going to create a volume so we can do some fun stuff. For an understanding of why I'm doing a series of blog posts on containers, read here. Docker Volumes You can create a container with a volume, or local, persistent storage. The usage is really simple: docker run -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' ` -e 'SA_PASSWORD=$cthulhu1988' ` -p 1450:1433 ` --name DockerDemo17vol ` -v sqlvol:/var/opt/mssql ` -d mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-latest This will create and kick off a new container based on SQL Server 2017. Nothing to it really. If you get the IP address for the machine, you can connect to…
In yesterday's blog post we pulled SQL Server images in preparation for today's blog post where we create containers from those images. If you haven't already, get Docker installed and follow the instructions here to get at least one image on your machine. If you're interested in why I'm talking about containers all week, read this. I'm using all PowerShell commands to control Docker. Docker Run You can use 'docker create' to create an image and then start it up. However, we can just get started running a container from one of the images we downloaded yesterday. We can just simultaneously create and start the container using 'docker run': docker run -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' ` -e 'SA_PASSWORD=$cthulhu1988' ` -p 1433:1433 ` --name dockerdemo ` -d mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-latest Let's break this down a…
Four years ago, after a bunch of dithering and some negotiations with Tony Davis, my editor, I started to update my book, SQL Server Execution Plans. We managed to convince Hugo Kornelis to be the tech editor. I started to do the real writing in early 2015. I was most of the way through a first draft and no one liked it. Tony was unhappy. Hugo was unhappy. I was unhappy. I was just trying to update the existing book, SQL Server Execution Plans. It wasn't working. We all came to the conclusion that the old book was wrong. Not simply in a technical sense, although there was a lot of that, but in a structural sense. So we started rearranging things. SQL Server 2014 came out, but I was…
Are you going to be in Florida in November? Me too. I'm privileged to say that I get to speak at SQLServerLive, part of the Live360 event. It takes place November 12-17 at the Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Studios in Orlando. I'm going to be presenting three different sessions. The first is on Azure SQL Database for the DBA. Adoption and interest in Azure and the platform as a service offering is growing like crazy. Get ahead of the curve and figure out how you can use this technology in your organization. I'm also going to be doing a session on automating the management of your Azure databases using PowerShell. I'm sticking to the platform databases with this session (no VMs), but I'm covering Pools, MySQL, Postgres, Azure SQL…
Blog post #7 in support of Tim Ford’s (b|t) #iwanttohelp, #entrylevel. Read about it here. Sooner or later when you're working with SQL Server, someone is going to complain that the server is slow. I already pointed out the first place you should look when this comes up. But what if they're more precise? What if, you know, or at least suspect, you have a problem with a query? How do you get information about how queries are behaving in SQL Server? Choices For Query Metrics It's not enough to know that you have a slow query or queries. You need to know exactly how slow they are. You must measure. You need to know how long they take to run and you need to know how many resources are…
If you're starting the process of moving your databases in Azure SQL Databast to v12, you need to do one thing. Make sure you have SQL Server 2014 CU5 or better installed on your machine with Management Studio (current list of updates). Otherwise, like me, you'll be looking at the above error. Just a quick blog post to help out. I saw this error, did a search, and didn't hit a single entry telling me what to do. I started the install of CU6 (I needed to catch up on cumulative updates anyway). While that was happening, I went to Twitter and posted to #sqlhelp to see if anyone else had hit this. I got a response from Amit Banarjee pointing me to this MSDB blog on the topic, reinforcing…
I'm absolutely in love with the concept of being able to create a backup directly to a protected, off-site location. Yeah, you can spend all sorts of money on terribly wonderful technology to enable that within your enterprise. And if you have that kind of money, great. But, what if you're like most everyone else and you just want a little more protection without mortgaging the house? Let's take a look at one possibility, backup to URL. There have been ways to backup to hosted storage, whether it was DropBox, AWS or Azure blob storage, for quite a while. But, every method I tried out involved setting up some type of drive on your system. As soon as you had your K:\ drive mapped out to AWS or whatever, you…
Welcome to Teched 2013 We're starting off with some type of James Bond video. Chase scene with a really cool car. Not quite French Connection, but good. OK, that was, if a little ballsy, "you'll never crack it" Jeez, how to upset people. And the car from the video drives out on stage. And that is Brad Anderson arriving. Guy7 looks like he does crossfit. "We spend our time making other people great" He's laying out the path of the future and, shock of shocks, he said SQL. Out loud. On stage. Twice. That's pretty cool. SQL Server often feels like a red-headed step child. Iain McDonald, comes out to introduce information about Windows Core. The OS covers everything from the phone to tablets to xbox to your servers. The…