At Microsoft Build in 2023 the world first heard about a new offering from Microsoft called Microsoft Fabric. Reactions to the announcement ranged from “meh” to “what is this?” To be fair, this is the typical reaction most people have when you talk data with them. Many of us had...
Book ReviewsData AnalyticsProfessional Development
Imagine you conceive an idea which will save your company millions of dollars, reduce workplace injuries, and increase sales. Now imagine company executives dislike the idea because it seems difficult to implement, and the implementation details are not well understood. Despite the stated benefits of saving money, reducing injuries, and...
The most popular feature in any application is an easy-to-find button saying "Export to CSV." If this button is not visibly available, a simple right-click of your mouse should present such an option. You really should not be forced to spend any additional time on this Earth looking for a...
This is one of those posts you write as a note to "future you", when you'll forget something, do a search, and find your own post. Recently I was working inside of Azure ML Studio and wanted to browse the sample datasets provided. Except I could not find them. I...
I am happy, honored, and humbled to receive the Microsoft Data Platform MVP award for the fifteenth (15th) straight year. Receiving the MVP award during my unforced sabbatical this summer was a bright spot, no question. It reinforced the belief I have in myself - my contributions have value. Microsoft...
After many months of editing, revising, and writing, my new book Pro SQL Server 2022 Wait Statistics: A Practical Guide to Analyzing Performance in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database is ready for print! You can pre-order here: https://amzn.to/3fQr7hz I thoroughly enjoyed this project, and I want to thank Apress...
A common software development practice is to take data from a production system and restore it to a different environment, often called "test", "development", "staging", or even "QA". This allows for support teams to troubleshoot issues without making changes to the true production environment. It also allows for development teams...
No Satya, thank you. And you're welcome. Let's do lunch next time I'm in town. This past week I received another care package from Satya Nadella. Inside was my Microsoft Data Platform MVP award for 2021-2022. I am happy, honored, and humbled to receive the Microsoft Data Platform MVP award...
My life changed twenty years ago, this very month. I was a developer, working for a small software company outside of Boston. Our product was a warehouse management system, built with PowerBuilder on top of Oracle. We had a handful of large customers helping to keep the lights on, but...
Last week I was reviewing an article and found myself needing information on the use of NOCOUNT as a standard for writing stored procedures. A quick internet search found this old post of mine, written back when I used to work for a living. Apparently, I was once asked to...
It's been a year, people. A full year of remote meetings. And honestly, it's as if you have learned nothing in that time. Remote meetings have a different dynamic that in-person meetings. I was hopeful the past year you would all come to understand this and adjust your habits accordingly. ...
Data AnalyticsDatabase DesignMSSQLSQL MVPSQL Server Performance
There’s something you should know about relational databases. They were designed to store data efficiently, protecting the quality of the data written and stored to disk. I’ve written before about relational engines favoring data quality and integrity, and how relational databases were not designed for the reading of data. Of...
At this point I believe we all have a "burner" email account or two. An email account we use when an email address is required from us, but we do not trust the person making the request. In addition to using email accounts that are 20+ years old, we can...
Each year, I try to find a good book to bring with me to the beach. A few months ago, I came across Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World while doom scrolling Twitter one night. I ordered the book and did not wait for the beach...
When the initial lockdowns were starting in late March, life was a bit confusing as we adjusted. As I felt reality and routine slipping away, I reached out to the one person I knew would help make sense of it all. That person wasn't available, so a week later I...
Ask three DBAs about their preferred performance tuning methodology and you will get back seven distinct answers. I bet a pound of bacon one of the answers will be “it depends”. Of course, it depends! But on what does performance tuning depend? Context. Most performance tuning methodologies focus on tuning...
As an admin, you often get requests from developers asking for elevated permissions on servers and systems. Inside of SQL Server, this is called 'sysadmin' access. As you can imagine, it is not a good idea to give this level of access to just anyone. I thought I would write...
“We recognize and value your exceptional contributions to technical communities worldwide.” This past week I received another care package from Satya Nadella. Inside was my Microsoft Data Platform MVP award for 2020-2021. I am happy, honored, and humbled to receive the Microsoft Data Platform MVP award for the twelfth straight...
AWSAzureDatabase DesignMSSQLSQL AzureSQL MVPSQL Server Performance
There are many methods available for optimizing the performance of SQL Server. One method in particular is examining your plan cache, looking for query plan warnings. Plan warnings include implicit conversions, key or RID lookups, and missing indexes to name a few. Each of these warnings is the optimizer giving...
AzureData Security and PrivacyMSSQLSQL AzureSQL MVP
I've written before about using sqlmap to perform sql injection testing against a website. It is also possible to use sqlmap to connect directly against a database. In this post I will show you how to use sqlmap to connect directly to Azure SQL Database. Once connected you can enumerate...
At SQL Server Live last November, I demonstrated enabling SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database. During the class discussion I explained you must use Powershell to modify SQL Audit for Azure SQL Database. So, that's my post today, showing you how it is done. By default, SQL Audit for Azure...
AWSAzureCloud ComputingMSSQLSQL Server Performance
Last October I wrote a review of the Gigaom SQL Transactional Processing Price-Performance test. That post references the original data warehouse test also published by Gigaom. I believe both Gigaom reports were funded by Microsoft. I found the first report on data warehousing to be of good quality. The SQL...
For years I have written a year end post about things that didn't happen to me for the previous twelve months. This year I've decided to pivot that theme. Instead of a post all about me, it's now a post about you. Well, you and all the stupid and horrible...
My final event of the year will be Black Hat Europe in London, the first week in December. This will be my second Black Hat event; the first was this past August when me and 20,000 of my closest security professional friends invaded Las Vegas.
Earlier this month Microsoft and GigaOM announced a new benchmark study comparing AWS RDS to Azure SQL Database. This study was authored by the same people that wrote the previous GigaOM data warehouse benchmark last year. I enjoyed the data warehouse study. I found it to be fair and thorough...
I've already written a post about how dashboards are a horrible way to communicate. I'm here today to remind you that your dashboards still suck. Let's start with the most recent example.
SQL Server performance objects are found inside the Performance Monitor tool, also known as perfmon. If you are using Performance Monitor for gathering resource metrics for SQL Server then you are familiar with a screen such as this one:
Late last Friday night, Microsoft announced that it was retiring the Microsoft Professional Program. The reaction from many was a general “WTH is that anyway?” Frequent readers of this blog will recognize the program where I earned certifications in Data Science, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence. I was also just...
[caption id=”attachment_19215” align=”aligncenter” width=”600”] “We recognize and value your exceptional contributions to technical communities worldwide.”[/caption]
Building upon my earlier post, today I want to share with you the updated graphic and links for the analytics and big data services offered by Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Last year I wrote a post comparing the data services offered by both AWS and Microsoft Azure. Well, there’s been some changes since, so it was time to provide an updated graphic and links.
SQL MVPSQL Server 2016SQL Server 2017SQL Server Performance
At VMworld in Barcelona this year there arose a question regarding SQL Server Standard edition and if it is NUMA aware. I was certain the answer was "yes", but it was pointed out to me that the documentation says otherwise.
During his keynote at AWS re:Invent, Andy Jassy made some statements that seemed…questionable. Well, questionable to me, at least. Not surprising, the questionable statements focused on databases, data services, and storage.
The internet provides everyone the ability to access data at any time, for any need. Unfortunately, it does not help guarantee that the data is valid, or clean.
I ignored the weight gain for years. I mean, I knew it was happening, I just did nothing. My clothes stopped fitting. I missed wearing my favorite shirts. But I wasn’t motivated to make a change.
[caption id=”attachment_19215” align=”aligncenter” width=”600”] “We recognize and value your exceptional contributions to technical communities worldwide.”[/caption]
A short time ago a colleague asked me where he could find a “Databases 101” guide for the non-technical professional. As it turns out, the internet is littered with information, and mis-information, regarding data and databases. This makes it difficult for someone entering the field of data and databases to...
Last week Microsoft bought GitHub and there was a flood of “the sky is falling” from the anti-Microsoft trolls as well as the typical knee-jerk reactionary type folks we find in the tech industry. It reminded me of the time four years ago when SolarWinds bought Pingdom. The day the...
SQL Server 2017 allows for the use of Python scripts called as an external script. SQL Server comes with some Python packages by default. Today I wanted to talk about adding Python packages to SQL Server 2017.
This week at the Microsoft Build conference a new provisioning option for Cosmos DB was announced. The new option, to provision throughput for a set of containers, is a wonderful new feature. However, this meant I needed to take some time to understand Azure Cosmos DB pricing compared to DynamoDB...
For decades, a pain point for SQL Server administrators has been determining when the last known DBCC CHECKDB was run against a database. Microsoft has not exposed this information in an easily digestible format. You can find a handful of options available online for returning this information. My favorite was...
Last week, Stack Overflow acknowledge their culture issues with this post. I’m glad to see them talking about these issues publicly, and they are actively looking to make things better. Admitting you have a problem is a good first step.
Data Security and PrivacyDatabase DesignMSSQLSQL MVPSQL Server 2017
I noticed some MSDN forum posts regarding SQL Audit not showing the full SQL statement. To the end user, it appears that SQL Audit is truncating of SQL statements. I decided to write a quick post to help clear up the confusion for large SQL statements and how they appear in SQL Audit.
From Strata last year, Kurt Brown from Netflix gives a wonderful talk on how Netflix get’s the most out of their data platform. The video is 37 minutes long and worth your time.
[UPDATED: Happy April Fool’s day folks, there is no such thing as SQL Server Buzzfeed. I do hope you were able to get a laugh or two from the headlines.]
Today I wanted to detail Azure SQL Data Warehouse costs vs AWS Redshift. This post is meant to follow up on two earlier posts (Azure vs. AWS Data Services Comparison and Azure vs AWS Analytics and Big Data Services Comparison), where I outlined the different services offered. In both of those posts, you will...
Last week I wrote a post that helped visualize the different data services offered by Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. This week I’m writing about the Azure vs. AWS Analytics and big data services comparison. This comparison took a bit longer because there are more services offered here than data...
Many people (and companies) say they are “data-driven”. Unfortunately, what that means is ”hey, I think this is true, go get the data that supports my idea. No, not that data, get the other data.” This is the common definition I see on a regular basis. If this describes you (or your company), then you are not data-driven....
Building on yesterday’s post, Azure vs. AWS Data Services Comparison, today I want to write about the Azure Cosmos DB costs vs DynamoDB and Neptune. I’m going to give an example today comparing only the NoSQL services offered by Azure and AWS.
Both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services offer a lot of data services. So many services that it can be hard to comprehend how the compare without a scorecard. So, that’s what I did here, I put together a quick image to help you make sense of all the offerings current available...
I wanted to like Slack, I really did. I have been a user for years before it became mainstream somewhere around 2014 it seems. These days everyone has a Slack community. (Well, I know of one company that insists upon using Yammer, but that’s a different blog post for another...
Last week while I attended the Microsoft MVP Summit, I had the honor to attend sessions delivered by Pedro Lopes (blog @SQLPedro) and his Tiger team. The SQL Server Tiger team are engineers that work with customers to solve their biggest issues and will help build and deploy patches as necessary....
Data Security and PrivacyMSSQLSQL MVPSQL Server 2017
The new version of SQL Server Management Studio (v17.5) brings with it a new feature: SQL Data Discovery and Classification. You might recall that in SSMS 17.4 the Vulnerability Assessment feature was added. So, that’s two new features in the last two releases. This is the beauty of de-coupling SSMS...
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) does not offer the ability to do a schema compare between two databases. Therefore, you have two options to do a schema compare for SQL Server databases. The first is to use Visual Studio. The other is to use a 3rd party tool. However, there...
The Data Migration Assistant (DMA) is a great tool made available by Microsoft. Successor to the SQL Server Upgrade Advisor, the DMA will perform an assessment of your database against a target version. The DMA can also perform the migration of both schema and data, if desired.
Database DesignMSSQLSQL Server 2017SQL Server Performance
Introduced with SQL Server 2008, page and row compression are turning ten years old this year. In that time, the internet became littered with posts describing both features, how they work, the performance gains, etc.
Not enough people know about the Audit and Threat Detection feature in Microsoft Azure. So, I’m hoping to help spread the word today. I decided to write a post to help explain the Microsoft Azure Threat Detection types.
Data Security and PrivacyMSSQLSQL MCMSQL MVPSQL Server 2016SQL Server 2017SQL Server Performance
Last week I wrote about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Today I want to show you how to check if your database server is protected against Meltdown and Spectre.
The Data Migration Assistant (DMA) offers you the ability to perform a feature assessment against your SQL Server database. Built as the successor for the SQL Server Upgrade Advisor, the DMA is a valuable tool for migration projects. I’ve written before about upgrades and the use of DMA as part...