On November 2, 2021, Microsoft announced the preview of SQL Server 2022, the most Azure-enabled release of SQL Server yet, with continued innovation in performance, security, and availability.
The rise of data represents a tremendous opportunity and also poses challenges. Companies are seeing their relational and nonrelational data proliferate exponentially on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and in hybrid environments. The most transformative companies drive predictive insights on current data, whereas others may struggle to drive even reactive insights to their historical data. Information may be siloed across geographies and divisions.
I was asked a question awhile back on the easiest way to do an incremental load from one SQL Server table into another SQL Server table. This is common in data warehouses or reporting tables as you wouldn’t want to truncate a large table and perform a full insert. Instead, you would want to only copy the changes from the source to the destination. This could be an insert or an update. The easiest way, IMO, is SSIS. Let’s take a look.
Here’s how my environment is setup. I have two databases appropriately named Transactional (for transactional data) and Reporting (for static report data). Two tables, Source and Destination.
I also added some dummy data as you see below. I’ve highlighted what is different and will need to be changed in the destination table.
Let’s open SSIS and create a new SSIS project. Drag and drop a Data Flow task into the design window, right click, Edit:
Next, drag and drop two OLE DB source components into the design window. I’m going to rename mine Source and Destination to match my table names.
Configure the two OLE DB sources to match the source table and the destination table. Below is a screenshot of my source connection manager.
Once your connection managers are configured let’s drag and drop two Sort components below each OLE DB Source and connect them to each source. We will be using a merge join next and the merge join component needs to have data sorted in ASC or DESC order. I always choose to sort on the Primary Key for each table.
In my example, I’ll choose to sort on my primary key, ID.
Next, drag the Merge Join transformation into the Design window and drag the data path from the Sort component to the Merge Join. When you attach the arrow to the transformation, the Input Output Selection dialog box appears, displaying two options: the Output drop-down list and the Input drop-down list. The Output drop-down list defaults to Source Output, which is what we want. From the Input drop-down list, select Merge Join Left Input, as shown below. We’ll use the other option, Merge Join Right Input, for the other connection.
Next, connect the data path from the other Sort component to the Merge Join transformation. This time, the Input Output Selection dialog box does not appear. Instead, the Input drop-down list defaults to the only remaining option: Merge Join Right Input.
Now, let’s configure the Merge Join transformation.
The first setting in the Merge Join Transformation Editor is the Join type drop-down list. From this list, you can select one of the following three join types:
Left outer join: Includes all rows from the left table, but only matching rows from the right table. You can use the Swap Inputs option to switch data source, effectively creating a right outer join.
Full outer join: Includes all rows from both tables.
Inner join: Includes rows only when the data matches between the two tables.
For our example, we want to include all rows from left table but only rows from the right table if there’s a match, so we’ll use the Left outer join option.
You now need to select which columns you want to include in the data set that will be outputted by the Merge Join transformation. For this exercise, we’ll include all columns. To include a column in the final result set, simply select the check box next to the column name in either data source.
Almost finished, but first let’s add a Conditional Split transformation. This will allow us to insert new records or update previous records.
In the Conditional Split Editor, I created two outputs. If (Destination) ID is NULL then the record doesn’t exist so we’ll perform an INSERT. If the ModifiedDate is different between the two tables then we know something has been updated since the last execution and we need to update the record. See below.
Since we can perform and INSERT or an UPDATE we’ll need two destinations. First, for the INSERT, we’ll simply be doing an INSERT into the table so we can drag the OLE DB Destination component into the window, choose “INSERT” in the Input Output selection window, and use the Reporting connection manager.
I’m going to check the “Keep Identity” box since the ID column is an identity column.
Next, for the UPDATE statement we’ll drag the OLE Command component into the window and configure it. Select “UPDATE” in the Input Output Selection window.
In the Connection Managers tab, assign the connection manager for Reporting.
In the Connection Managers tab, assign the connection manager for Reporting.
In the column mappings tab, assign parameters:
Final package should look like the following:
Save and execute. You can see that we updated two records and inserted one record:
Going back to our query you can see that everything matches up now:
This post walks you through how to backup a PostgreSQL database to an AWS s3 bucket.
There are a few installations we’ll need to make before allowing our on-prem Postgres server to communicate with AWS.
Install pip
Use the curl command to download the installation script. The following command uses the -O (uppercase “O”) parameter to specify that the downloaded file is to be stored in the current folder using the same name it has on the remote host:
curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
Run the script with Python to download and install the latest version of pip and other required support packages:
python36 get-pip.py --user
When you include the --user switch, the script installs pip to the path ~/.local/bin.
Ensure the folder that contains pip is part of your PATH variable.
ls -a ~
Add an export command at the end of your profile script that’s similar to the following example.
source ~/.bash_profile
Now you can test to verify that pip is installed correctly.
pip3 --version
Install the AWS CLI with pip
Use pip to install the AWS CLI.
pip3 install awscli --upgrade --user
Verify that the AWS CLI installed correctly.
aws --version
Now that we have AWS CLI installed, we can configure our new client. You will need AWS Access Key ID, AWS Secret Access Key, Default Region Name and Default Output Format This information you can go to the IAM AWS Section.
aws configure
To view your s3 buckets use the following:
aws s3 ls
Now that AWS is configured and we can view our s3 buckets, let’s make a backup:
Starting with SQL Server 2017, Microsoft announced you can run SQL in Docker containers. This is great news for DBA’s because we tend to run multiple installations of SQL Server locally and with Docker we can spin up (or remove) a SQL instance fairly quickly.
I’m not going to go into what Docker is because there’s
an entire website
that goes into much more detail than I ever could. This post is going to focus
on a simple SQL installation on Windows 10 using Docker. Let ‘s gooooooo!
First, let’s download and install the latest version of Docker. To find the latest version, open an internet browser and navigate to https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/. From here, click “Download from Docker Hub”
You will need to create a docker ID and password if you don’t have one. Once you have this info let’s login.
Next, let’s click “Get started with Docker Desktop” from the home page and “Download Docker Desktop for Windows”
After the download is complete, go ahead and start the install. On the Configuration screen, I’m going to Use Windows containers instead of Linux. Click OK.
Docker Desktop is installing:
After
installation succeeds, you must log out so make sure to save everything!
Upon logging back in, you will be greeted with this message, Hit OK and reboot.
After reboot, let’s open Powershell (as administrator)
and issue the following statement. This will show you that Docker is installed
properly and it will give you the version we are running.
Docker Version
Next, let’s do a search for a SQL Server image. Back in Docker Hub, in the search box, let’s type SQL Server and click on Microsoft SQL Server:
This page will give you all sorts of valuable information.
You can also use the following PowerShell statement to
pull SQL Server images:
Docker search Microsoft
Again, from Powershell, let’s download the Microsoft SQL
Server Developer Edition images. To do this use the following:
–name – this is the name of the container
you are creating
-d – Runs the container in the background
otherwise the container will take over your cmd when it starts
– p port:port – Maps a TCP port on the host
environment (first value) with a TCP port in the container (second value). In
this example, SQL Server is listening on TCP 14331 in the container and this is
exposed to the port, 1433, on the host. I’m using 14331 because I’ll create
multiple containers and each container needs a different port number.
-e – Creates environment variables under the
container execution runtime, for example, sa password and End User License
Agreement (EULA)
sa_password – Create sa password for SQL
instance (Hint, don’t use a $)
ACCEPT_EULA – Yes
It will take a few minutes to finish the install, but it’s
much shorter than a regular SQL install. Once finished, run the following to
get the IP address of the container (make sure to use your container name after
docker inspect):
As you can see, the IP for my container is 172.31.29.174. If I open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to this IP using the sa account and password I created I can connect successfully:
If you have any issues connecting try using the
following docker statement to view the logs:
Docker container logs –details DockerSQL
To remove the container, simply stop the container
Support for SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 ended on July 9, 2019. That
means the end of regular security updates. However, if you move those
SQL Server instances to Azure or Azure Stack, Microsoft will give you
three years of extended security updates at no additional cost. If
you’re currently running SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2 and you are unable
to update to a later version of SQL Server, you will want to take
advantage of this offer rather than running the risk of facing a future
security vulnerability. An unpatched instance of SQL Server could lead
to data loss, downtime, or a devastating data breach.
If you have a SQL Server failover cluster instance (FCI) or use hypervisor-based high availability, or other clustering technology on-premises for high availability, you’ll probably need the same in Azure. If you need to migrate to Azure/Azure Stack at end of support, and you require high availability for SQL Server 2008/2008 R2, there’s only one solution recommended by Microsoft: SIOS DataKeeper. SIOS DataKeeper enables clustering in the cloud, including the creation of a SQL Server 2008/2008 R2 failover cluster instance, allowing you to achieve your high availability goals.
Planning and building SQL Server in RDS doesn’t have to
scare you. It’s actually pretty easy and in this post will go over planning a
SQL Server deployment in RDS, creating SQL Server in RDS, and last but not
least configuring the new instance of SQL Server.
Once you can verify that your environment will run
properly in RDS you’ll need to look at the pricing model. When you setup RDS
for SQL Server, the software license is included. AWS used to have a program
called “Bring your own license” or “BYOL”, which allowed you to use a license
that was already bought from Microsoft via an agreement or other. This has been
rumored to expire on June 30, 2019. The software license that is included means
that you don’t need to purchase SQL Server licenses separately. AWS holds the
license for the SQL Server database software. Amazon RDS pricing includes the
software license, underlying hardware resources, and Amazon RDS management
capabilities. The pricing will depend on the selections such as size, edition,
etc.
The following editions are supported in RDS:
Enterprise
Standard
Web
Express
Notice, Developer Edition is not included with RDS and
Web Edition supports only public and internet-accessible webpages, websites,
web applications, and web services.
Instance
Type
You can also choose from On-demand or reserved
instances. On-Demand DB Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour
your DB Instance runs with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the
costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and
transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable
costs. This is good for development environments where you can power on and off
the server as it’s being used.
Reserved Instances give you the option to reserve a DB
instance for a one or three year term and in turn receive a significant
discount compared to the On-Demand Instance pricing for the DB instance. Amazon
RDS provides three RI payment options — No Upfront, Partial Upfront, All
Upfront — that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your
effective hourly price.
RDS provides a selection of instance types optimized to
fit different relational database use cases. Instance types comprise varying
combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the
flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your database. Each
instance type includes several instance sizes, allowing you to scale your
database to the requirements of your target workload. View more details here: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/instance-types/
Storage
Another item to look at when planning your deployment is
storage. RDS uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes for database
and log storage. Depending on the amount of storage requested, Amazon RDS
automatically stripes across multiple Amazon EBS volumes to enhance
performance.
RDS offers three different storage types:
General Purpose SSD – also called gp2, this storage type
offers cost-effective storage that can be used for a broad range of different
workloads. These volumes deliver single-digit millisecond latencies and the
ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS for extended periods of time. I would recommend
putting small to medium sized databases on this type.
Provisioned IOPS – This storage type is designed for I/O
intensive workloads, particularly database workloads that require low I/O
latency and consistent throughput. This is also built on SSD and targeted for
IO intensive, high performance databases. Cost wise, this is the highest of the
three storage types.
Magnetic – This storage type is mostly used for backward
compatibility. Amazon recommends using gp2 or Provisioned IOPS for any new
builds. This is ideal for test and dev environments when performance isn’t a
concern. This is the cheapest of the three storage types.
One more item to consider when planning the deployment
is network connectivity. Applications will more than likely need to connect to
your RDS environment so there are a few import concepts to look at it.
Availability Zones – this is simply a data center in an AWS region. The following AWS regions exist.
Virtual Private Cloud – also called VPC, this is an
isolated virtual network that can span multiple Availability Zones. It’s used
to group different types of resources to the network that need to talk to each
other.
Virtual Private Cloud – also called VPC, this is an isolated virtual network that can span multiple Availability Zones. It’s used to group different types of resources to the network that need to talk to each other.
Now that we’ve outlined some of the deployment planning
tasks, let’s build an instance through the AWS console.
Once inside the console, we’ll click on RDS under the Database heading:
Once we are on the home page for RDS, we can click Create Database under Get Started. There’s also info for Pricing and costs and some documentation on getting started:
Notice in the top right corner is the Availability Zone in which you are logged into. In my case, I’m logged into US East (Ohio) since I’m on the Central Time Zone and Ohio is located closer to me than any other zone:
Back to the Select Engine page. For this post, I’m going to install Microsoft SQL Server Express, but you can see the other database engine platforms that are available and the associated editions:
Next page we can see some of our database details. There are all items we discussed in the planning deployment section above. License model, DB engine version, DB instance class, Time Zone, Storage Type and allocated storage are all configurable on this page. Below are my selections:
Scroll down to Settings header and configure the DB instance identifier, Master username and password. The DB instance identifier is a unique name for your DB instances across the current region. For this RDS instance I’ll name it SQLFreelancer:
On the Advanced Settings page we’ll configure Network and Security, Windows Authentication, Database Options such as port number, Encryption (where available), Backup retention, Monitoring, Performance Insights, Maintenance options, and Deletion protection. I’m going to choose all the defaults for this post, but this is a page where you want to make sure you choose what is best for your environment.
Once you are finished on the Advanced Settings page, click Create Database.
Now how easy was that? Creating a new DB instance took about 2 minutes. Once your instance is created let’s click on View DB Instance details:
The details page gives you all sorts of info about your instance:
As defined by Amazon, Amazon Relational Database Service
(Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database
in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while
automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning,
database setup, patching and backups. It frees you to focus on your
applications so you can give them the fast performance, high availability,
security and compatibility they need.
RDS is also referred to as a Database as a Service
(DbaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) not to be confused with Infrastructure
as a Service (IaaS) which we’ll discuss in the next paragraph.
DbaaS
vs. IaaS
DbaaS
IaaS
You can choose any DB platform such as
Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB
You create a Virtual Machine and install
OS and DB platform such as SQL Server
DbaaS takes care of backups, High
Availability, Patching, OS, underlying hardware
Iaas will only take care of the VM host
layer and it’s hardware. You will need to manage patching, HA, security, etc.
This is essentially like an on premise server.
Being an Operational DBA, there are a few tasks that RDS
will take over freeing up time for the DBA to focus on other things. Some of
those tasks include the following:
Backups: RDS will continuously take backups
and allow point in time restore capabilities. We no longer have to worry about
disk space or archiving backups to another location.
HA: RDS can automatically setup mirroring to
another data center which allows for redundancy of databases.
Patching: RDS will automatically patch your
SQL Server based on a maintenance window defined by you.
Add Resources such as CPU/Memory: RDS can
increase CPU or Memory on demand as opposed to managing an on premise where the
server might need downtime and you would have to orchestrate the change with
Server Administrators.
Upgrade: With a push of a button you can
automatically upgrade SQL Server and easily roll back if necessary.
Monitoring: Instead of buying a third party
monitoring tool and running through the setup RDS provides a service called
CloudWatch that can easily tap into SQL Server and alert when things go wrong.
Wow! All of these items make managing a SQL Server much
easier for a DBA right? Do you even need a DBA if you’re running RDS? Of course
you do! While it does make some tasks easier for a DBA, RDS will not do the
following:
Write queries, tune queries, test queries:
RDS has no knowledge about the data in each DB. Only a DBA knows the
application and business processes to write and tune queries.
Manage DB security, change control,
configuration settings: Only a DBA familiar with all of the procedures of his/her
company can really make sure the environment is secure, that all changes are
being documented, and that a specific configuration applies to what the
databases are supposed to do.
Tune indexes or maintenance: Again, only the
DBA knows what databases might need indexes or aren’t using specific indexes.
You also know when to run maintenance procedures.
Now that we’ve discussed some of the pros and cons, why
do businesses use DbaaS?
The speed of provisioning increases business value
because instead of waiting weeks to bring a server online including purchasing
software, servers, licenses, managing resources, etc. you can click a few
buttons in the Amazon console and have a fresh SQL Server online in a matter of
minutes.
The automation of regular tasks means there’s less
possibility of human mistake and less hours spent by the admins patching and
managing certain parts of the servers, which means no more late nights.
Employees can now spend more time query tuning, deploying new functionality,
and making sure the performance is the best. All of this leads to increased
revenue for the business.
Using bookmarks in Power BI help you capture the currently configured
view of a report page, including filtering and the state of visuals, and later
let you go back to that state by simply selecting the saved bookmark.
You can also create a collection of
bookmarks, arrange them in the order you want, and subsequently step through
each bookmark in a presentation to highlight a series of insights, or the story
you want to tell with your visuals and reports.
In this post we’ll quickly go over
how to create a few bookmarks and view them as a slideshow if you will.
I’m going to use my March Madness Report I created in an earlier post. Once my report is opened in Power BI Desktop, I’m going to click on the View tab in the ribbon and select “Bookmarks Pane”
This should bring up a new Bookmarks pane inside PBI Desktop:
Remember, bookmarks are used to capture the current view of the report so I’m going to use the default view where I’m showing all data and I’m going to name the bookmark “Home”. Make sure all filters are selected to show all data and click Add under the bookmark pane. This will create a new Bookmark, named Bookmark 1. Click the ellipsis and select rename to rename the bookmark appropriately.
Next, I like North Carolina, so I’m going to go to my Team Filter and choose North Carolina which will show me data for only this team.
In my bookmark pane, I’m going to click Add again and rename to North Carolina.
Next, I want to view data on North Carolina from 2000 to present so I’ll change the Year Filter.
In my bookmark pane, I’m going to click Add again and rename to North Carolina 2000-present.
Now, if I click on any of bookmarks,
it will take me to the data that was saved for each. This is a great way to
present data in a meeting/conference so you don’t have to manually change the
filters during the engagement.
We can also click the View button in the Bookmark pane to view a slideshow using the arrows at the bottom to navigate: