Azure DevOps, Power BI, and more in Database Weekly (2020-10-24)

 Database Weekly for October 24, 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  What's Causing the Pushback with DevOps? The term DevOps gets horribly abused. Don’t get me started on all the weird additions to it like DevSecOps. No, I just mean the term itself gets beaten up quite a lot. It’s to the point where people are starting to shy away from talking about it. I’ve even changed my approach when discussing DevOps to instead say “a DevOps style process”. My intention is to try to steer clear of some of the rocks forming around the term. What I don’t entirely understand is why the pushback is occurring, but it’s out there. The core concepts of DevOps are pretty simple. Let’s focus on people in order to help them get their work done. We start with the elimination of silos and walls between groups, combine Development with Operations. It’s in the name. We focus on process that better supports people so that more, and better, stuff gets delivered for the organization. In support of that process, we implement as much automation as we can. That, in a nutshell, is DevOps. Who could possibly push back against that? Well, if that paragraph above represented how everyone understood DevOps, we wouldn’t be seeing pushback. However, there’s just tons of information out there that is poor. People get told stuff, a lot, that just isn’t true. So, a bad opinion forms. Further, a DevOps style process is something of a challenge to implement. You have to make changes to how you do things, always a challenge. Then, in order to support more and better automation, you have to spend a lot of time and effort in learning new tools and building new stuff. Sometimes, the implementation of a DevOps process fails. So, the misinformation and the failures combine to build a somewhat negative impression. However, more and more people are successfully implementing DevOps approaches. Even as you see some implementations fail, the details of the process, for example, getting your databases into source control, still results in overall improvement in how people work. In short, even if we toss the term because it’s being abused, the overall approach is succeeding and won’t go away. That’s a win! Grant Fritchey [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 [Format your own SQL code using this free online formatter]( Redgate have launched their very own Online SQL Formatter powered by SQL Prompt. Visit the page here to try formatting your SQL code with a few pre-defined styles, or find out how to create and share your own styles with SQL Prompt. [Improving SQL Monitor’s Database Performance]( Jeremiah Peschka, a tech lead for SQL Monitor deve... [SQL Snippets Galore, Added to SQL Prompt]( Imagine having at your fingertips all the metadata queries you need to explore your SQL Server databases and then, a few clicks later, all your diagnostic queries to troubleshoot... [Meet Redgate at PASS Virtual Summit 2020]( Redgate are Gold sponsors of PASS Virtual Summit, which this year is available to all online. It's time to accelerate your data career by joining Redgate's Advocates who will be presenting a variety of sessions, as well as demo solutions throughout the week of 11 - 13 November. See what's happening and register today. [Improve your Database Deployment Performance with Monitoring]( SQL Server monitoring can enhance collaboration and stability by creating a feedback loop between devs and DBA teams about the impact of deployments. In this free whitepaper, we discuss how SQL Server monitoring can assist with a number of common challenges, from removing bottlenecks to identifying and responding to deployment-related performance issues. Read the whitepaper here. Administration [Solve SQL Server Resource Database Crash]( Based on Microsoft Documentation [The Curious Case of… resolving call stack symbols on SQL Server 2019]( I haven’t had a need to resolve call stack symbols (see my post here for an explanation) on a SQL Server 2019 instance until last weekend, when I was prepping... [Access Violation error when querying from a system table function with parallelism]( Following an incident at a customer’s production environment, Nathan Lifshes and I realized that we stumbled upon a yet-unknown bug in SQL Server, causing an access violation error... [Azure Data Studio – extension for SQL Server Import]( Last release note for Azure Data Studio was about ... [How To: Create Schema Only Database Copies]( Have you ever been asked to make a schema only cop... [Configure SQL Jobs in SQL Server using T-SQL]( Total: 1 Average: 5SQL Server Agent is a component used for the database tasks automation. For instance, we need to perform Index maintenance on Production servers during the non-business... Azure Databricks, Spark and Snowflake [Azure Databricks – Pin Cluster]( Before discussing why you would want to pin a cluster it would be useful to understand the different states of a cluster... [Azure Databricks to Power BI]( A very common approach is to query data straight from Databricks via Power BI. For this you need Databricks token Azure DevOps [Azure DevOps–Reconfiguring an Agent]( This post looks at how to re-configure a local Azu... Azure SQL Database [Azure SQL Database Elasticity – Presentation Notes]( This blog covers the content and points to the code used to create the demos in my Azure SQL Database Elasticity presentations. As of today, I have presented this... Azure Synapse (SQL Data Warehouse and Data Lake) [Quickly get started with samples in Azure Synapse Analytics]( Get started immediately on your first project with the new Knowledge center... [Quickly get started with samples in Azure Synapse Analytics]( To further accelerate time to insight in Azure Syn... [Top Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI questions]( I have listed below the top questions I see from customers about Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI, and the blogs that I have written that try to answer... The... [An Idea for Self Service Using Azure Synapse Analytics]( I’ve been playing around with Azure Synapse Analytics for a while now exploring the preview features and trying to find a meaningful use case for the ‘single pane of... Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS) [Azure Site to Site VPN Blocking Some Traffic]( I ran across an interesting a couple of weeks ago when working with a client. The client has several subsidiaries each with their own vNet. The client had a... [Introducing the Microsoft Azure Modular Datacenter]( The Microsoft Azure Modular Datacenter (MDC) is designed to support datacenter scale scenarios for humanitarian aid, disaster response, and other needs for high-intensity, secure cloud computing in challenging environments. Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars [What you’ll learn at my 2020 PASS Summit presentation]( T-SQL is my favorite aspect of working with SQL Server. The release of SQL Server 2005 coincided with the beginning of my involvement with the community as a presenter... [One Thousand SQL Saturdays (*ish)]( This weekend is SQL Saturday #1000, running virtually from Oregon. It’s a good schedule, with lots of neat sessions. I’ll be speaking in the am, and am happy to... The... [Monitoring Amazon RDS with Redgate SQL Monitor]( With the launch of SQL Monitor 11, you can now monitor your SQL Servers hosted on Amazon RDS alongside your on-premises and other cloud-based servers, instances, and databases. Join this webinar on October 28 to discover the benefits of monitoring your entire estate; including on-premises and cloud-hosted databases, from a single pane of glass. [PASS virtual summit: thoughts, pre-con, and sessions]( As you probably already know by now, the 2020 edit... DMO/SMO/Powershell [Attempting SUM() OVER () in PowerShell]( Like most things in life, this piece of work came about while attempting to complete something else... Data Mining / Data Analysis [Launch a Successful Data Analytics Proof of Concept]( Taking your organization’s data to the next leve... Data Privacy, Compliance, and GDPR [US Insurance Industry Data Security Regulations]( Over the past few years, several new regulations r... Database Design, Theory and Development [In Memory OLTP Defeated Our Tempdb Problems]( At D2L, we’re the perfect candidate customer for In Memory OLTP features, but we’ve held off adopting those features for years... [How to Alter User Defined Table Types (Mostly) Online]( Last year, Aaron Bertrand tackled the question, How To Alter User Defined Table Types. Aaron points out that “There is no ALTER TYPE, and you can’t drop and re-create a type that is in use”. .. [Adding a Check Constraint to a Table–#SQLNewBlogger]( Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. I had to do this the other day,... The... [What is Database Continuous Integration?]( Have you ever longed for a way of making the delivery of databases more visible, predictable and measurable? Do you ever wish that they would be of better quality, quicker to change, and cost less? Grant Fritchey explains some of the secrets of doing Continuous Integration for Databases to relieve some of the pain-points of the Database Delivery process. [Storage 101: Monitoring Storage Metrics]( Well tuned storage is essential for SQL Server performance. In this article, Robert Sheldon explains the metrics that are important to watch. DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) [Continuous deployment at scale]( More organisations are adopting DevOps, but what happens as the codebase grows? In this article, Siddharth Rao gives advice on how to implement continuous deployment at scale.… The post Continuous... [Git Anatomy]( In this article, Dino Esposito gives an overview of git explaining repository, commit, and branch. Performance Tuning SQL Server [How to Import Perfmon Data into a SQL Server for Analysis]( If you followed the last video, I showed you how to set up windows perfmon for ongoing performance metric collection on all... [Let’s Talk About Build vs. Buy]( I have written a nearly 1,000 page book on SQL Ser... [Geek Talk #5 on Query Tuning by Erik Darling]( Live Fish I recently had the pleasure of appearin... PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI [AUTOMATING POWER BI DEPLOYMENTS: CHANGE DATA SOURCE CREDENTIALS]( Changing the credentials of a data source is very similar to what we’ve done with report parameters, but there are a few... [Get Power BI Desktop to write the DAX for you]( Recently I had to get some data from a Power BI Dataset. At first, I started... [Use Visual Studio Code to create Power BI External Tool]( For this article, I want to share a way for you to create your own Power BI “Helper Tool” and register it... [Custom Format Strings in Power BI]( The ability to apply custom format strings directly inside the Power BI Desktop report view was first announced back in February 2020. At the time I was quite excited... [New Gateway, Power BI data source management and more… (Roundup | October 19, 2020)]( Thanks for watching this week's Power BI news roun... Product Reviews and Articles [Book Review: SQL Server 2019 Administration Inside Out]( This book aims to update your DBA skills to cover SQL Server 2019, how does it fare? Professional Development [My Stream About Writing a Technical Book]( I streamed about writing a technical book earlier ... [The Internet is full of business cats: Dealing with the breakdown of the work/home divide]( Finding the right balance between collaboration an... [Is communication always important?]( Conventional wisdom says that communication is the critical for success in just about any aspect of life, be that personal relationships or within teams or corporations. Of course, miscommunication... [Nine Key Factors That Identify Truly Data-Driven Organizations]( eWEEK DATA POINTS: Data-driven enterprises centralize their knowledge of data by automatically capturing metadata on what the data describes, from where the data emanates, who's using it, and how... SQL [Efficiently Polling Remote Data Sources]( In this article, Edward Pollack describes some of the issues when querying against remote data sources. He covers remote SQL Servers and also connecting to a PostgreSQL database. T-SQL [Another fun thing with NULLs]( I saw this on a post at SQLServerCentral and wanted to share... [T-SQL: Get The Text Between Two Delimiters]( I swear It’s Not String Splitting I have to do this a fair amount, and I always go look at this little cheat sheet that I have. Then it occurred to... [Using Triggers to Replace Scalar UDFs on Computed Columns]( Your database is riddled with computed columns whose definition includes a scalar user-defined function. Even up to & including SQL Server 2019, which boasts faster scalar function processing, any... The Lighter Side [New Music Friday: Killa DBA’s New Release Just Dropped]( Familiar readers will know that I don’t actually do New Music Friday here very often. Okay, ever. I don’t do it ever. Because frankly, nobody writes music about us.... Virtualization and Containers/Kubernetes [SQL Virtual Machines]( I was recently watching the first session of the Azure SQL Bootcamp by Anna Hoffman (twitter) and Bob Ward (blog|twitter) ... Continue reading The post SQL Virtual Machines appeared first...  [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. This newsletter was sent to you because you signed up at SQLServerCentral.com. 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