The next nine days, I’m traveling to three cities for four events. We’ll just call this the 9-3-4 gauntlet of speaker life. I booked this travel as four, one-way flights to get the itinerary I needed to make the most of my schedule and will have breaks between each event to make sure I don’t kill myself my last two weeks at Delphix. GLOC Today I’m heading to the Great Lakes Oracle Conference, (https://gloc.neooug.org/) where I get to present on DevOps and hang out with all my Oracle peeps. GLOC is the second largest regional Oracle user group event and…
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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…
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There’s something for having job security and many of the solutions that I see offered for RDBMS challenges offer just that. With compliance with EU’s GDPR, (General Data Protection Regulations) just around the corner, (mark you calendar, May 25, 2018) you’d think we’d all be scrambling for a simpler solution to discovering and addressing all that GDPR data. Quick refresher for those of you going, “What is GDPR?” Data security is a known focus of GDPR when you talk to folks, but it’s much more than just security. It’s about extended rights of the individual in the EU. There’s four…
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I’m on track to fly home tomorrow, March 11th after nine days and three events. I’m pretty exhausted and just ready to go home and catch up on some sleep…:) I started out last weekend in Victoria BC and was thrilled to be on this emerald island of the Pacific Northwest. British Columbia is gorgeous as it is, but Victoria is a special place that quickly became one of my favorite places in the world. The Victoria event was an inaugural one and well attended. SQL Saturday Victoria was an event that Delphix sponsored and my peer, Serge, did an…
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Since I reformatted my Surface Pro 4 so I could have my Docker running again, I also needed to recover my local SQL Server instance I like to have available on my PC. This was a perfect time to get everything up and running, but instead of my standard way of doing this, use SQL Server Operations Studio, (SSOS). The Lesson Most SQL Server DBAs have a GUI took to assist in managing their database environment and unlike Oracle DBAs, (at least before multi-tenant and the cloud) it was common for SQL Server DBAs, (on average) to have considerably more…
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Yes, there’s a Part III! You’re going to have to start scripting and now that you know a few VI/VIM commands, lets talk beginning scripting with shell. In our example below, we’re going to start a new project called “test”. For this, the requirements are: create a new folder off of the /u01/scripts directory create a new file called test.sh inside the testdir directory ensure it uses bash as our chosen shell # cd /u01/scripts # mkdir testdir # cd testdir # touch test.sh # ls test.sh # pwd /u01/scripts/testdir As you can see, I’ve now fulfilled the first two…
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So more than one person contacted me about my last post and stated that they didn’t see a problem with SQL Server on Linux running as the root user. Me: Although enhancements have changed Windows installations for applications to run with a unique user, I created a mssql OS user even back on SQL Server 2000 on Windows as I had a tendency to use similar security practices for all database platforms as a multi-platform DBA. With that being said- yes, it introduced complexity, but it was for a reason: users should be restricted to the least amount of privileges…
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Linux has become a clear area of required learning for SQL Server DBAs in as of SQL Server 2016. What? You didn’t read that right, you say? Yes, while a Linux edition was introduced in SQL Server 2016, it was pushed to the forefront with the release of 2017, along with Python in a push towards stronger DevOps initiatives, (one OS to rule them all!) and Python to assist with even stronger analytics trends. As most database platforms already run on Linux, the SQL Server community has a bit of catch up to do, so as many advanced DBA linux…
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Just over a year ago, an alarm of emails, posts and projects arose in Europe surrounding the General Data Protection Regulation, also known with the acronym, GDPR. It was as if someone had poked the sleeping bear of IT and woke it and boy, was it grumpy. Suddenly EU technologists were learning all about advanced system security, how to encrypt and mask data, multi-tier authentication, along with creating procedures when a user requested to be forgotten. Projects and money were being allocated to take on this demand that considering its initiative was passed back in 2014, you’d think would have…
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I’m starting to move towards doing more videos and hope to improve my video skills, (and maybe add a dance sequence, ya know, like the hip kids…) Check out this post and please, do add comments, ask questions or just tell me what you think? Have an awesome Wednesday and no, don’t comment on my consistent need to make a strange face at the beginning of a video… 🙂
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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…
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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…
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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…
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I’m here for the last day of UKOUG Tech17 and it’s been an awesome event. This is my first time to this event while in Birmingham and although quite the party town on the weekends, its a great city to have an event like UKOUG’s trio of events during the week. I was welcomed to great turnouts to both my presentations and then enjoyed numerous sessions by other’s, such as Richard Foote, Jonathan Lewis, Roger MacNicol and others that one might not get a chance to see in at most US Oracle User Group events. My biggest challenge in my…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…