Its quite common that the first time you work with a feature in a cloud interface, it can appear so foreign until you’ve done it a few times. If it’s a task that you may not do often or only once, it can be downright painful. It doesn’t matter who the cloud provider is or the application, we all have felt the pain of this type of situation and why some of us even started blogging…:) Until its familiar, it may not feel comfortable and you may not even like how it works. As a newer employee at Microsoft, I’m…
-
-
I’ve started to write a series of articles on Simple Talk from Redgate on Linux for the SQL Server DBA. Thanks to Kathi Kellenberger, who came to my pre-con in Indianapolis SQL Saturday and then asked if it was something that I’d be up to doing. The biggest challenge when doing one hour sessions on Linux at SQL Saturdays is that you find out, one hour is just no where, near enough. The eight hour pre-con we get to dig in deeper, actually work through a number of labs and I feel like students leave with a better grasp on…
-
They say the devil is in the details and as I come from the DevOps side of the house, it would only be natural that I’d be attracted to how Microsoft Flow works with Power BI. For those that aren’t familiar with Microsoft Flow, think of it like If This Then That, (IFTTT) from Microsoft. I used IFTTT to automate a number of tasks at my previous company- everything from posting to social media automation, notifications on Slack, creating weekly status reports and other tedious tasks that I hated having to do manually. Microsoft Flow, is a powerful SaaS tool…
-
There aren’t too many changes to the Dynamic Management Views in SQL Server 2017, but one was mentioned that I worth a second look and often have a lot more going on than upon first look. Gif Credit: ancsy55.tumbr.com DM_DB_LOG_STATS This is an addition to SQL Server 2017 and available in Azure Database/Azure Data Warehouse to simplify and synchronize how we query information about log statistics, not just backups. The added benefit of this is that it only requires the VIEW DATABASE STATE privilege to utilize it, which eases the demand on anyone who’s tried to grant rights to view…
-
So where did 2017 go?!?!? I really, really would like to know… Needless to say, it’s time to do a year in review already and I actually have time to do it this year! DBAKevlar Blog I wrote over 100 blog posts this year between DBAKevlar, Delphix and partner sites, but I’ve enjoyed sharing with the different communities. There’s significant changes going on in the IT world regarding the future of the Database Administrator. This deafening message came through when pulling together my top blog posts for 2017, with Death of the DBA, Long Live the DBA presenting itself as…
-
I felt like playing with something new for the holidays and chose to investigate the Graph Database feature in SQL Server 2017. Graph Database is no simple feature, so this is going to take more than one post, but we’ll start here and see how long it takes for me to be distracted by another new feature…:) As you can only have one user graph per database, that should limit my investigation to controlled chaos. Graph databases are all about relationships- relationships between data. The output can provide insight into data that might not be apparent in a tabular fashion…
-
Tomorrow Pass is sponsoring a Linux Marathon for all the SQL DBAs getting ready to go big with Linux. The schedule is jam packed with sessions on getting started with Linux, working with SQL Server on Linux and then a few sessions, including my own for essential tools that the DBA needs to work with Linux. I’m the last one on the schedule for the day, to be followed by me heading down to the south side of town for the monthly, (and very Christmas-y) SQL Server User Group meeting. If you aren’t a member of the PASS organization, it…
-
So while finishing up my slides for the Microsoft Pass Linux Marathon webinar on Dec. 13th, Tim and I started to discuss the apples vs. oranges comparison of SQL Server on Linux process management vs. an Oracle instance. We discussed the differences one might expect to see using different tools with the two database platforms and the first question surrounded information pmap would provide. We commonly use pmap to map out processes, including child and sub-processes of a particular PID. As my current images have multiple database platforms on each of them, I quickly spun up a Docker image of…
-
As most of you know, I’m working to update all of my SQL Server knowledge, which hasn’t gone as deep as I would like since SQL Server 2012. So there are a couple things we’re going to focus on today, first of which is the top in the list which I’ve highlighted, Legacy Cardinality Estimation: By default, this value is turned off and as the optimizer is essential to database performance and in each database platform, handled differently, it’s worth starting to disect. The Database Scoped Configuration settings, which are database specific, and can be accessed via the SSMS, right…
-
SQL Server 2016 introduced a new security feature called Dynamic Data Masking. With the General Data Protection Regulations, (GDPR) breathing heavy down most IT in America’s neck, its good timing. “Data Masking” is a term that has a strict definition, but different results when we actually discuss the technology behind it. The main goal is to obfuscate critical data in a non-reversible process and I deem it separate from encryption technology. With SQL Server’s Dynamic Data Masking, the original data is still present in the database, with a masking rule applied to hide the data, allowing anyone with the unmask privilege…
-
As I begin my education in SQL Server 2017, as well as Azure SQL Database, my attention was caught by the optimizer improvements and especially automatic tuning. Often referred to with features starting with the naming convention of “dynamic” in Oracle, many automatic features either thrill or frustrate DBAs, no matter what the platform. The frustration enters with the features introduction and often decreases as the feature matures and becomes more stable. With the introduction of the Automatic Tuning from Microsoft, there’s a sense of concern, but also some very promising ways Microsoft is introducing these features. With Automatic Tuning,…
-
So we’ve covered a few basics of a Linux host in Part I– The File System Users, groups Basic Commands with basic arguments And file and directory permissions Hopefully, what I share next will build on the first post and enhance your knowledge as you move forward with Linux. Reading the contents of a directory, gathering information on files and locating files are some of the most common tasks a DBA will perform as they work on a server. Many of the following commands require you to “pipe” a second command onto the first. This is done by joining the…
-
I did a couple great sessions yesterday for the awesome Dallas Oracle User Group, (DOUG.) It was the first time I did my thought leadership piece on Making Sense of the Cloud and it was a great talk, with some incredible questions from the DOUG attendees! This points me to a great [older] post on things IT can do to help guarantee tech projects are more successful. DevOps is a standard in most modern IT shops and DBAs are expected to find ways to be part of this valuable solution. If you inspect the graph, displaying the value of different projects…
-
For over a year I’ve been researching cloud migration best practices. Consistently there was one red flag that trips me that I’m viewing recommended migration paths. No matter what you read, just about all of them include the following high level steps: As we can see from above, the scope of the project is identified, requirements laid out and a project team is allocated. The next step in the project is to choose one or more clouds, choose the first environments to test out in the cloud, along with security concerns and application limitations. DBAs are tested repeatedly as they continue to…
-
Azure is the second most popular cloud platform to date, so it’s where Delphix naturally is going to support second on our road to the cloud. As I start to work with the options for us deploying Delphix, there are complexities I need to educate myself on in Azure. As we’re just starting out, there’s a lot to learn and a lot of automation we can take advantage of. It’s an excellent time for me to get up to speed with this cloud platform, so hopefully everyone will learn right along with me! We’ll be using Terraform to deploy to…