Troubleshooting tempdb, Power BI Visuals and more in Database Weekly (2020-05-16)

 Database Weekly for May 16, 2020 Problems displaying this newsletter? [View online](. [Database Weekly]( The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge Editorial  Bad Managers I’m constantly hearing stories about terrible managers, and, of course, I’ve experienced quite a few myself. In fact, I can’t come up with many nice things to say about most managers when I look back over my career. (Luckily, my manager at Redgate is wonderful!) Early in my tech career, I was working at a small startup with just four employees. The owner of the company avoided talking to me in person for several months, making excuse after excuse about why he was too busy when our scheduled one-on-ones were due or we both happened to be in the office at the same time. Another consulting firm had been trying to recruit me for about a year, and I decided to take the offer. When I handed my boss the resignation letter, he finally told me that he hadn’t talked to me in months because he was afraid that I was going to ask for a raise. If he had just given me a few minutes of his time once in a while, I probably would not have left. I should have gotten used to managers who would cancel appointments at the last minute or just not show up because I continued to see that at other organizations. Maybe, in some cases, the managers had too many responsibilities, but it came across as having no value for my time. Many readers will have other examples of bad manager behavior such as not paying attention at all to what the team is working on, being a bottleneck to progress of projects, not being able to handle disputes among co-workers, not being able to discipline them when needed, not listening to their team members' opinions and ideas, or being unapproachable so that team members are afraid to come to them when things go wrong. Bad managers can demoralize the team and be the reason that talented staff leave for other jobs. Not only can this be the cause of project delays as new people must be hired and trained, [high turnover is expensive]( for companies and can directly impact the bottom line. I began to wonder why managers are more likely to thwart progress instead of leading, inspiring and empowering their charges, and there are dozens of [articles]( talking about it. In many organizations, there is not a good path for promoting great tech workers. How do you promote the best database administrator or developer? If the only path is team leader or department manager, many people who have great tech skills will end up in positions where they are not suited because tech skills and managing people are very different. Other reasons might be that managers are not given training to be managers, and also often the wrong things are measured which leads to managers doing things that reach certain metrics that don't really lead to success. Of course, having a manager who understands what you do is nice, but managers must have communication and leadership skills. They must be able to empower their employees to succeed and grow. Employees should feel like they and their manager are working towards the same goals and share enthusiasm about the success of projects. While a manager cannot say yes to every idea or request, they should at least listen and think about what the team member has to say. At the end of the day, when their team looks good, the manager will look good, too.  Kathi Kellenberger [Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums](  The Weekly News All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit. Vendors/3rd Party Products [How to use SQL Clone, SQL Change Automation and Git to enable automatic branch switching during database development]( Alexander Diab explains how a team of developers c... [Installing the #SQLPrompt Public Preview in ADS]( The SQL Prompt Public preview extension for Azure Data Studio is out and you can add this easily. This is a quick post showing a few ways to install... The... Administration [The More Database Features You Use, The More Painful Database Changes Become]( Vanilla Features are new. Features are sexy. Features do things for you automatically. But they often come with a lot of baggage. They may not work at all with other features They may... [Troubleshooting tempdb Space Usage]( Tempdb is a critical resource in SQL Server. It is used internally by the database engine for many operations, and it might consume a lot of disk space. [How to search SQL Server Agent Command Text for a string]( Question: I'd like to find all SQL Server Agent Jobs with a certain string within the Command section . There's been a change in reference to a database table, therefore I need to review all SQL Server Agent Jobs and check they are not referencing this database table. [Are Statistics Being Used?]( You know those tweets that you see once but can never find again? I remember seeing one a while ago where someone tweeted to #sqlhelp asking if the internal inserted and deleted tables had statistics or if they were like table variables, which didn’t. [Find the SQL Server service account with sys.dm_server_services]( SQL Server 2005 introduced Dynamic Management View... [[Video] Free DBA Training Month: Setting Up Alerts and Ola’s Scripts]( While you’re stuck inside wondering if you’ll ever be able to attend a user group meeting again, I’m giving you free access to training materials that your boss probably... Analysis Services / BI on the MS Stack [what is a pie chart?](  This article is part of our back-to-basics blog series called what is…?, where we’ll break down some common topics and questions posed to us. [Adding Analysis Services (SSAS) to your SQL Server instance–#SQLNewBlogger]( Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. This is a fairly simple task, but recently... The... Backup and Recovery [Day 10 – Simple Restores – 31 days of dbatools backup and restores]( Simple Restores Finally we’re going to start using Restore-DbaDatabase after talking about it for a couple of days. Given all the options that Restore-DbaDatabase offers, we’ll start off simple... Big Data Cluster [Deploying Big Data Clusters Part 1: Planning]( This series of posts is essentially my presentation from the recent Data Weekender popup virtual conference – in blog form with some bonus additional content. This post focuses on... Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS) [Running Azure from my android phone]( The other day I had a random thought. I wonder if there is a version of Azure Portal for Android. ... Continue reading The post Running Azure from my android... Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars [The top 5 challenges of database monitoring in 2020]( How has the state of database monitoring changed in the last 12 months? We exclusively reveal the top 5 challenges revealed by our annual survey, and dive into what they mean for the industry [How SQL Clone 4.4 enables fast onboarding for Database DevOps]( The latest version of SQL Clone showcases new integrations with our DevOps tooling. Join Microsoft MVP, Kendra Little, to learn more about how cloning technology can enhance your Database DevOps process. DMO/SMO/Powershell [Querying Azure VM state with PowerShell]( I was recently given the task of identifying the state of an Azure VM so that an automation script using the az vm run-command invoke would not fail if... [How to Add Help to PowerShell Scripts]( PowerShell scripts are the tool of choice for many admins, but how do you make them easy for others to use? In this article, Greg Moore shows how to... Data Privacy, Compliance, and GDPR [Another California Data Privacy Law]( The California Consumer Privacy Act is a lesson in missed opportunities. It was passed in haste, to stop a ballot initiative that would have been even more restrictive: In... Database Design, Theory and Development [SQL: Why didn't my SQL Server transaction roll back on a primary key violation?]( There's a question that I hear all the time in SQL Server forums:  Why didn't the transaction roll back when a primary key violation occurred? Take a look... [How SQL Server stores data types: integers and decimals]( Last time we looked at the internals of how dates and times are stored in SQL Server. This week we’re going to look at how numbers are stored. This... DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) [Getting Started with Automatic Database Branch Switching]( Alexander Diab demonstrates how a team of developers can work on and test features in different branches of a SQL Server database development project, while their local development database... General [How SQL Clone 4.4 enables fast onboarding for Database DevOps]( The latest version of SQL Clone showcases new integrations with our DevOps tooling. Join Microsoft MVP, Kendra Little, to learn more about how cloning technology can enhance your Database DevOps process. HA/DR/Always On/Clustering [Stop using Sys.dm_hadr_cluster_members for “quorum” information]( I’ve now run across a few different instances where the monitoring for quorum was done via this DMV. On the surface, it seems like nothing would be wrong with using the “number_of_quorum_votes” column to check on the members of the cluster and see their voting status. However, this isn’t quite the case… [SQLpassion Online Training about Availability Groups]( (Be sure to checkout the FREE SQLpassion Performan... MDX/DAX [Expression Based Formatting in DAX]( There was a very subtle but important change made in the April 2020 release of Power BI Desktop that you may have missed. Take a look in the format... Performance Tuning SQL Server [SSMS Memory Grant Info]( Over some time, SQL Server Management Studio has expanded memory grant information. Memory grant provides memory grant estimate as well as actual runtime memory grant information. In this blog post, I will explain each element of ‘Memory Grant Info’, [Row counts and arrow width, a primer]( This month (May 2020), I will post several blog posts, all about the same theme: row counts in execution plans, their representation as arrow width; how to use it,... [Find Indexes Used In Query Store]( One of the most frequent questions you’ll hear online is how to determine if a particular index is in use. There is no perfect answer to this question. You... PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI [Technique to improve Power BI report perf by reducing visuals]( Having a lot of visuals in your Power BI Report ca... [Speed Up Data Refresh Performance In Power BI Desktop Using Table.View]( It can sometimes be frustrating to work with slow ... [Showing Database Images in Power BI and Tabular]( The Power BI image-rendering visualizations, such as Table or Card, expect image links to public servers hosting the images with anonymous permissions. This has obvious shortcomings. [#POWERBI BOOKMARKS VS PAGE NAVIGATION]( Power BI Bookmarks, the secret behind many sleek reports, It revolutionised the entire PBI Report design approach. Initially, Bookmarks were portrayed more as some saved views, which can be used for storytelling than for navigation. [Mapping COVID-19's Effect on Local Employment with Power BI]( Right now it seems like time is accelerating while data is trailing behind. If you are like me, then you have been voraciously reading the news and latching on... [Copy queries in Power Query for Power BI or Excel]( Did you know you could copy queries, in Power Quer... Professional Development [Learning New Skills]( A lot of folks have taken advantage of more time at home recently to pick up new skills and hobbies. In my case, I have started learning more about... [Learn TSQL for free online – starting today]( Thanks to the support of Redgate, I’ve launched a new course which teaches you the basics of TSQL. The course is totally free, no logins required — we don’t... [T-SQL Tuesday #126 – Folding@Home and 3D Printing]( This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by my frien... [T-SQL Tuesday #126–Folding@Home]( It’s T-SQL Tuesday time, and this one is interes... R Language [Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis: Analysis with R]( In the third article of this series, Sanil Mhatre demonstrates how to perform a sentiment analysis using R including generating a word cloud, word associations, sentiment scores, and emotion... T-SQL [Explain CROSS APPLY like I’m 5.]( A good friend of mine (Randolph West (blog|twitter... [Fundamentals of table expressions, Part 2 – Derived tables, logical considerations]( Itzik Ben-Gan continues his series on table expressions in SQL Server, explaining several use cases, pitfalls, and syntax wishlist items. The post Fundamentals of table expressions, Part 2 – Derived... Tools for Development [Create charts from SQL Server data using Azure Data Studio]( Images, charts help to visualize the data in an informative way. It is an easy way to understand the data and perform analysis on it. An image is worth thousands of words. Suppose you have an employee data set and your management wants to view a high-level summary of it. Virtualization and Containers/Kubernetes [What is Hyper-V? and how to enable it?]( Hyper-V is a Microsoft feature to create a virtual...  [RSS Feed]( This email has been sent to {EMAIL}. To be removed from this list, please click [here](. If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@sqlservercentral.com. 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