Prior to full support for availability group listeners in Azure, we were forced to use availability groups without a key feature that makes them truly valuable – listener entry points. A listener is the same concept as a cluster name in the FCI days. Essentially, we look at a listener as the single point of entry into the solution or grouping of active databases. active means: databases currently involved in a high availability solution, promoting data service uptime.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has a lot of cool little tips and tricks. Last night, while presenting for 24 Hours of PASS, I used the Window Split function and noticed a few “oohs” and “aaahs” on Twitter. Here’s how you do it. Open a query in SSMS. In this case, I was looking at a nonclustered index creation statement, and wanted to keep it at the top of the window while I ran several queries, seeing if they would use it.
This is an outline of the tools and scripts I used while demonstrating conversion of a sample “we make all our changes in production” database into a basic pipeline to verify and deploy changes automatically, as well as verify restores on a nightly basis. This post contains all of the steps, software, and scripts that I used during the “Automated Deployments” talk at SQL Saturday 320. There aren’t any pictures, if I did that than what would be the point of presenting it?
After an extended (to put it mildly) break from blogging, I’m back. One of the many reasons for less writing: more presentations! (Another is violin lessons, but that’s another story.) Here is what I have upcoming in September. I hope you can join me for at least one! With PASS Summit fast approaching, PASS is holding a 24 Hours of PASS Summit Preview Edition. Starting at 12:00 am UTC on Tuesday, September 9, there will be 24 one-hour sessions!
After quite a while it has finally returned: another Stupid Me™®©! A reminder: Every time I do something "stupid", which happens from time to time, I'll do a little blog post on what happened and how I solved it. The reason for this is twofold: I'll have a solution online I can consult if it happens again and other people can benefit from my mistakes as well. Because remember the ancient Chinese proverb: "
As many of you know, Rob Farley and I have been friends for quite a number of years. You may have also seen Rob’s post on SQLBlog recently announcing that Rob and I have taken that friendship and longtime relationship, to the next level by bringing LobsterPot Solutions to the United States. LobsterPot Solutions has been a long standing, highly skilled consulting company in the SQL Server Consulting space, based in Australia.
After my review of Tableau Dashboard Cookbook, I read another book about Tableau, namely Tableau Data Visualization Cookbook by Ashutosh Nandeshwar. The book is published by Packt but I am relieved to say this time there were no significant editing issues. In fact it is quite well written and as far as I could tell there were no spelling mistakes or typos (yeah those things can really bug me out when reading a book).
Validation exists to “ensure that the application is robust against all forms of input data” (owasp.org). Invalid data can cause unexpected execution errors, break assumptions elsewhere in your application, introduce errors into reporting, and even let someone hijack your service to attack others (script injection, sending spam, etc). When we’re talking about web form submission, the majority of invalid data tends to be users that missed a required field or mis-entered a strict value, like a phone number.
I recently had the pleasure of presenting for the Adelaide SQL Server User Group. I truly enjoyed the presentation and the group attending. The best part of this presentation is, it was on Merge Replication and all the great things we can accomplish with it. While setting up demonstrations for that presentation, I began to think about how effective we can be with SQL Server features. While some features may be specifically written for tasks, they are not always feasible in our specific environments.
A few months ago I followed an introductory course about the data vault modeling technique for data warehouses at a local training provider. As part of the training, I received the book Modeling the Agile Data Warehouse with Data Vault written by Hans Hultgren who also is an instructor for the official data vault certification. This blog post is a review of this book; I will not introduce the concepts of data vault modeling.