The Daily Dose

Move Data from SQL Server to Azure Blob Storage with Incremental Changes – Part 1

By Ginger Daniel | Azure , Cloud , SQL Administration , SQL Development , SQL Server

One of many options for Reporting and Power BI is to use Azure Blob Storage to access source data.  Most of the documentation available online demonstrates moving data from SQL Server to an Azure Database, however my client needed data to land in Azure Blob Storage as a csv file, and needed incremental changes to […]

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Backup and Restore Databases with CHECKSUM and VERIFYONLY

By Lori Brown | Backup and Restore , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server

I found out that I have been missing something from our regular database backups that I had no idea that I should have been using all along.  I know about verifying your backup file and have incorporated into our standard maintenance routines one that will periodically test backups by restoring using VERIFYONLY.  However, I totally […]

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Adding a Missing Index Killed Performance

By Jeffry Schwartz | Indexes , Missing Indexes , Performance Tuning , Query Tuning , SQL Server

SQL Server 2017 suggested an index to improve performance, so we added it in a development environment. The “improvement” made the query run almost 50 TIMES longer than the original! See how we fixed this issue.

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Use DDL Triggers to get Instance and Database Change Notifications

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , SQL Administration , SQL Server

I have been working on some improvements to some of the regular ways we monitor for important changes.  We always have to be on the lookout for unexpected changes being made in the SQL instances that we monitor since often times we are not the only team who has sysadmin access to the instance.  We […]

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And Now a Couple of Job Queries

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , Jobs , SQL Administration , SQL Server

Hooray!!  We finally have our 70-764 and 70-765 certification exams done and can turn our attention back to blogging more regularly.  Those exams were pretty tough mostly because there was a lot of information that had to be memorized since there are always aspects of SQL that we don’t regularly use and there is no […]

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Should I Replace My FOR XML PATH String Merges with String_agg?

By Jeffry Schwartz | Function , Performance Tuning , Query Tuning , SQL Development , SQL Server

If you are looking for major performance gains, the answer is no.  However, if you are using SQL Server 2017 and developing new code, you should consider using the new String_agg function that is available on SQL Server 2017 because code that uses this function is so much more readable and easier to write and […]

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Are All Delimited-String Parsers Created Equal?

By Jeffry Schwartz | Function , SQL 2016 , SQL Development , SQL Server

Overview In short, no.  However, for many years there was no alternative to the T-SQL option, and even when there were other viable options, it was unclear whether it was worth changing existing code to take advantage of the new technologies.  With the addition of the string_split function in SQL Server 2016, it is worth […]

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Troubleshoot SLEEP_TASK Wait Type

By Ginger Daniel | Miscellaneous , Performance Tuning , Query Tuning , SQL Development , SQL Server

Jobs on a SQL server can take milliseconds or minutes to complete depending on the size and complexity of your query and also the SQL environment on which it’s executing.  It’s important to have a baseline or at least be familiar with the normal amount of time your SQL jobs take to execute.   For a […]

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Find Out Which Databases Have Multiple Files

By Lori Brown | Helpful Scripts , Miscellaneous , SQL Administration , SQL Maintenance , SQL Server

This might be kind of basic but since I am working on a comprehensive script to discover things that a DBA really needs to know about, I made a couple of queries that will produce a list of the databases that have multiple files along with the locations of the physical files.  One query finds […]

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