Have you ever been tasked with creating test data for an application and then ran into performance problems once the application moves to production? Many of us manage databases or applications that contain regulated data that can’t leave a production environment. This means that we need to “clean” the data if it’s going to be used in QA or development work and one common way to de-identify the data is to simply update columns like firstname and lastname with a simple format “firstname” + counter; however, this results in all the data being unique and sequential. Firstname1, firstname2, firstn ..read more

When I was 11 I got my first computer, an 8088 with 4.5 mhz. I didn’t know much about computers at the time but I knew it was cool. It took me a while to figure out that there was a turbo mode to take that puppy up to 8.5 mhz. Dialing up to BBS hosts with 2400 baud… the nostalgia is in full effect. That’s right. The internet we know today wasn’t even a thing yet. Back then the idea that computers could be used to identify objects was just an idea for the movies. Today is a different story. Cognitive services do what was the unthinkable of which identifying people, brands, and other objects, cl ..read more

If you’ve ever been a DBA and seen the mess that you get with SQL Agent Jobs without a clean naming standard for your job schedules and job names then you’ll appreciate this tip. If you haven’t been a DBA that’s OK too. Years ago I came up with my own naming standard for SQL Agent artifacts and I’ve always felt better when the messy room was clean. No Really! That’s exactly what this is like. A messy room where you are pretty sure you put the item you’re looking for in but you just can’t seem to find it until you clean 95% of the mess and then you’re so exhausted that you don’t have time to do ..read more

Azure Purview is a compliance and data governance platform in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. The platform is currently in public preview and has quite a few features; but, does not currently import any of the extended properties that you may have added over the years to your SQL Server objects. Luckily Azure Purview has a number of different ways you can interact with its APIs. Purview CLI is a rich tool for the command line, PyApacheAtlas is a python based tool, and you can .NET or even Kafka. For this topic we’ll use PyApacheAtlas, which I’m sure you already knew based on the blog title. What’s in ..read more

Is Microsoft’s licensing scheme getting you down? It’s 2020 and there are now plenty of data platforms that are good for running your enterprise data workloads. Amazon’s Aurora PaaS service runs either MySQL or PostgreSQL. I’ve been supporting SQL Server for nearly 22 years and I’ve seen just about everything when it comes to bugs or performance problems and am quite comfortable with SQL Server as a data platform; so, why migrate to something new? Amazon’s Aurora has quite a bit to offer and they are constantly improving the product. Since there’s no license costs its operating expenditures ar ..read more

I’m excited and happy to announce that I’m part of the AWS Community Builders.  Check out more on Twitter with the #AWScommunity tag. To learn more about the program and other cool things that AWS is doing in the cloud, check out this blog from AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-new-aws-community-builders-program ..read more

On a few occasions I’ve referred to GCP (Google Cloud Platform) as the “Windows Phone of cloud providers” and what I meant by that is they have a great product that little market share when compared to Azure and AWS; but, should you be looking at GCP? Initial Thoughts My first thoughts when looking at the GCP portal is that it is plain and looks like a classic ASP page from 2007; but, when navigating through the sight and comparing it with the Azure portal I must admit that Google has always done better by doing simple. The clean interface feels more like an Apple store and is almost more invi ..read more

Earlier this week Microsoft released the latest cumulative update for SQL Server 2019 and as you can expect there are quite a few items addressed including a fix for UDF inlining that I had posted on recently. You can find the update and a complete list of fixes here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4552255/cumulative-update-5-for-sql-server-2019 ..read more

I got a mailer for “The Container Store” this week and thought of the following scenario so I figured I’d hand-draw a comic to lighten your weekend. Enjoy ..read more

SQL Server 2019 brings a lot of great new features. Many are introduced by the IQP (Intelligent Query Processing) features and greatly improve query performance. Some time ago I posted about Halloween protection and how using SCHEMABINDING in your Scalar UDFs can eliminate the need for ugly SPOOL operators. You can read more about that here: https://sqltechblog.com/2016/10/31/why-halloween-slowed-your-queries/ Microsoft has a great post on this new feature here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/user-defined-functions/scalar-udf-inlining?view=sql-server-ver15 As for the ..read more