Using All Your Tools

I'm a big fan of using tools to get work done. That might not be a surprise, as I work for Redgate Software, where we make tools to help you work with SQL Server. Certainly I find it hard to write code without SQL Prompt, as I've become used to the amazing intellesense it provides. In fact, I sometimes find myself a little crippled without it. I'm lucky in that most of my employers have been willing to pay for third party tools to make my job easier. I think most of them find that these tools pay for themselves because I get more work done with less effort.

However, not all tools cost money, and there are plenty of tools that you can add to your toolbelt to become a better developer or DBA at your organization. Perhaps the best thing you can do is learn to write better T-SQL. Erik Darling had an interesting post this week on removing functions from the WHERE clause. I didn't give you specifics, but he does have a few ideas on things to think about Erik writes great posts on performance tuning, and you ought to read his posts every week in this newsletter.

There are plenty of other T-SQL experts that can help you out. From our Stairway Series on T-SQL to Jeff Moden's T-SQL articles to Dwain Camp's posts (RIP, Dwain) to various posts from Drew Allen, Jonathan Roberts, and many more. You can learn a lot by reading and practicing the various techniques others write about and share on a regular basis. I'm not a great T-SQL guru, and I constantly learn from these indivudals and others.

In addition, you might go back to the basics. Monica Rathbun wrote about features that help you get the best performance on Linux, but really these are features that you should be using on Windows if they fit your workload. If you don't know how to use any of these features, Monica has links, and we have more articles at SQLServerCentral to help you.

Tools aren't just those things you pay for. Tools can be written by you, others, or purchased. These are the scripts, utilities, and most importantly, knowledge, that you use to solve issues. Take time time to ensure you are constantly looking to grow the tools at your disposal.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Phil Factor shares a handy keyboard shortcut diagram that reveals some of the most useful of Prompt's keyboard shortcuts, and a wallchart showing every piece of Prompt functionality, what it does, where to find it in the various menus, and of course its keyboard shortcut.

Phil Factor explores and discusses the current state of the art in SQL Formatting, as done automatically by SQL Prompt.

You want to use SQL Compare or SQL Change Automation (SCA) to create or update a database, and at the same time ensure that its data is as you expect. You want to avoid running any additional PowerShell scripting every time you do it, and you want to keep everything in source control, including the data. You just want to keep everything simple. Phil Factor demonstrates how it's done, by generating MERGE scripts from a stored procedure.

Data Masking is key to providing realistic test data for DevOps teams while ensuring compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and other regulations. Gartner recently published their 2019 Market Guide for Data Masking covering their analysis, recommendations, and Representative Vendors – including Redgate. Get the Complimentary Report.

Australia and New Zealand’s leading cloud account software provider Xero needed a cost-effective monitoring solution with better features and coverage. Read Xero’s story about how they switched from their old monitoring tool to Redgate’s SQL Monitor.

In this blog post, we will learn about the extended event to capture memory grant feedback. I created this extended event during recent consultancy. First appeared on SQL SERVER – Extended...

I would share my knowledge and findings of a situation where there was a mismatch between sys.database_files and sys.master_files for the TempDB database! First appeared on SQL SERVER – Mismatch...

I have been writing about the Memory Grant Feedback feature. Today we will discuss various properties of MemoryGrantInfo in this blog post. First appeared on SQL SERVER – MemoryGrantInfo Property...

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A question that I’ve seen come up frequently jus...

Lately, I have been doing a lot of work troubleshooting certain behaviors in SQL Server for workloads that are, to put it simply, designed horribly. As a part of...

CaseUntil now we needed Third Party tasks or PowerShell to deploy an SSIS project in DevOps. Now Microsoft finally released its own SSIS DevOps tasks. How does it work? Replace PowerShell...

This is likely something that most people know, but it was a bit confusing for me. This post is really here to remind me and help cement this in... The...

This is the fourth and final post in a series about modern Data Lake Architecture where I cover how we can build high quality data lakes using Delta Lake,... The post Data...

A few weeks ago I attended the annual PASS Summit ...

Recently I was asked what has changed the most in my 35+ years of working with technology. I replied “The pace of change”. When I started on mainframes, we...

Watch this week’s episode on YouTube. A year ago...

GigaOm, an independent research firm that I highly...

Amazon Web Services’s CPU design unit is working on a new multi-core processor for AWS servers. The new CPU is said to use Arm’s new Neoverse N1 architecture and...

Microsoft Ignite 2019 has passed, and as one would expect, there were many Azure announcements. I’m not going to do my usual and list every announcement in this article...

As leader of the PASS High Availability and Disast...

I’m excited to announce that I will be offering a full-day pre-con about Power BI report design in the coming year called Bookmarks, brain pixels, and bar charts: creating... The...

We just had our final event of the year and lookin...

On Wednesday December 18 16.00-17.00 GMT/ 10.00-11.00 Central Microsoft Data Platform MVPs Kendra Little, Steve Jones, Kathi Kellenberger and Grant Fritchey will come together for this festive webinar special to discuss their highlights and favourite memories from throughout the year.

Date and time: Wednesday December 4 15.30-17.00 GMT/ 09.30-11.00 Central - To deliver value quickly to customers, you need to be able to code, test, and deploy database changes quickly and reliably. Doing so requires quality test datasets for use in your DevOps pipelines, and the ability to sanitize, refresh, reset and re-deploy these datasets without pain.

Deep Dish SQL If you’re in Chicago and heading to SQL Saturday 2020, I’d love to see you at my…

Every DBA should have basic PowerShell skills. In this article, Greg Moore explains how to write a PowerShell script that can create a window for a countdown timer.… The post...

Was the potential for bias considered in these lit...

The logic for referential integrity can be implemented in application code, but to make sure that it is enforced, include foreign key constraints in the database design instead. In...

Maybe you’re using DevOps within your database development and deployment. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re automating all the things or maybe you’ve got a completely manual set of processes.... The...

Redgate’s 2020 State of Database DevOps Survey is open now. Share your views on Database DevOps today for a chance to win a new 65GB iPad Air. Plus, for every entry, Redgate will donate $1 to UNICEF.

It’s still 2019, but we’re looking forward to ...

Total: 2 Average: 3Recently, I was assigned to a project – our customer purchased a new SAN, and they wanted us to replace the old one with a new...

Toshiba has introduced a new line of energy-efficient hard drives for surveillance applications. The new DT02-V series HDDs will support up to 32 HD streams and offer capacities of...

In recent years, displays with an ultrawide aspect ratio have gained traction both among gamers and among prosumers. At first, monitors with a 21:9 aspect ratio were released by...

Click to learn more about author Grahame Morrison. An interesting conundrum has perplexed many IT and DevOps departments. When it comes to disk drives, what’s behind the gap in...

Realtek has entered the SSD controller market and scored several design wins with ADATA for retail SSDs. The ADATA SU750 entry-level SATA drive is not as important to their...

This article describes the differences between eager evaluation and strict evaluation in DAX, empowering you to choose the best evaluation type for your data models. A conditional expression in...

This article describes how you can create a compar...

Aaron Bertrand shows a simple way to keep your filtered indexes effective even under forced parameterization. The post Filtered Indexes and Forced Parameterization (redux) appeared first on SQLPerformance.com.

Memory grants, now here’s a fun thing that can p...

PAUL WHITE IS WRONG Ha ha. Just kidding. He’s never wrong about anything. But he did write about Eager Index…

Serializable, and some of the other isolation levels can have performance implications. Recently I came across a case where I needed to find queries that were being run against...

I have written about both types of parameters in Power BI; Power Query parameters and also the What If parameters. However, still many people are not aware that these...

You can concatenate a list of values in Power BI in two ways; Using Power BI DAX functions such as ConcatenateX, or through Power Query. For some scenarios, there...

I have previously written about how to calculate the same period last year calculation and compare this year’s values with the last year’s values. However, sometimes, you don’t yet...

I am excited about this blog post, this is based on the New service in Cognitive Service name “Anomaly Detection” which is now in Preview. I recorded a video...

I haven’t been very good at sharing my analytics work as often I feel others are more skilled in this Tags:  azure, Data Security, Power BI, Security Del.icio.us Facebook ...

There are two types of parameters in Power BI, Power Query parameters, and What if parameters. In this article, I’m going to explain a very useful use case of...

If your Power BI report is slow, most of the time the reason is something to do with the way you have modelled your data or the way you...

First question, why bother with layouts?Using layouts in Power BI allows a user to make their visuals stand out better, the page looks professional and more appealing to its...

Khie Biggs, a software developer on the Data Masker team at Redgate, explains how a recent set of Data Masker improvements should make it significantly easier and faster both...

SQL Change Automation 4.1 now allows users to develop static data changes from SQL Server Management Studio. The post Using SQL Change Automation in SSMS to Track Static Data Changes...

Chocolatey is a package manager that helps you install, upgrade, and uninstall packages (applications) on Windows quickly and easily from the command line. Spoilers: The command I show in...

We only recently reported on the story that Amazon are designing a custom server SoC based on Arm’s Neoverse N1 CPU platforms, only for Amazon to now officially announce...

Today, we have launched AWS ECS Cluster Auto Scaling. This new capability improves your cluster scaling experience by increasing the speed and reliability of cluster scale-out, giving you control over...

This month, I have done more minor improvements, e...

Thanks to the successful funding campaign on Indiegogo I was able to fund the November 2019 release of Database Health Monitor. Here are the release notes. Version 2.9.4 Release...

SQL Server 2019 is ready available for use, but be...

SAS Viya is a cloud-enabled, in-memory analytics engine which allows for rapid analytics insights. Viya utilizes the SAS Cloud Analytics Services (CAS) to perform various actions and tasks. Best...

Customers have asked us to provide an easier way t...

I’ve been tinkering with SQL Server on Linux lat...

Each SQL Server user has a default schema. This th...

Here, in this blog, I’m continuing a theme that I started in a previous blog, ‘What’s in that database? Getting information about routines’. In that blog, I just wanted...

We're pleased to see that there are now a large number of people using our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs, and that number grows every day. One...

All Day If I sent you these three queries and asked you if they’d return 0 or 1, what would…

Immutability In many programming languages, string...

Raised Right It seems like every time I check out a server, the query plans are a nightmare. Users are…

You might need to extract part of a string from a given string. T-SQL has a number of functions to help you do that. Take a look at these...

Another year, another traditional Christmas song or carol turned into a fun technology-related version! This is the sixth year and my ninth song. I hope you enjoy your 2019...

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Here is the updated list for December 2019 of all the tools which I recommend. Do let me know if you use any of the above tools. First appeared on...

It is the first post on series related to installation and configuration of Docker containers on the Microsoft Windows platform. This series is for professionals who start their journey...

Total: 1 Average: 4Introduction Containerization has become the dominant topic after the Server Virtualization and Cloud Computing Eras. While many thought leaders assert that current computing paradigms are not...