It’s worth noting that a lot of people will never need to create their own database. You may never create your own tables or other data structures either. You may only ever run backups and restores and manipulate the security on the system and let application installs create databases for you. That’s completely understandable and perfectly in line with the needs of many businesses and many accidental DBAs. However, it's a good idea to understand what this stuff is and how it works as part of understanding SQL Server. A Database Is Actually Files You need to store information that you want to be able to retrieve later. It’s necessary that you organize that information. If you were working with a word processing program, you store different documents in different…
The best way to learn any software is to start using it. There are a bunch of software tools in the SQL Server toolbox, but the biggest and most important is SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SSMS is where you'll spend most of your time when you start to work with SQL Server. It provides a very large series of graphical user interfaces for creating databases, setting up security, reading data out of the database, and all sorts of other things within your SQL Server instances, the databases stored there, and all the stuff inside those databases. It also supplies you with an interface to the basic scripting language of SQL Server, through which you can do almost anything to the server. The scripting language is called Transact Structured Query…
To get started with SQL Server, you need to install it. However, I'm not going to teach you how to do a SQL Server install. Instead, I want to point you towards a couple of sources of information, and, give you some alternatives to installing SQL Server. Install SQL Server As much as I enjoy sharing information with you through this blog, and despite the fact that I read a lot of other technology blogs and other resources online, the single best source of information on SQL Server remains Microsoft and their SQL Server Documentation. This information is up to date and very well maintained. Yes, I'm sure you can find somethings to complain about in there, but overall, it's the starting point for all SQL Server learning and understanding.…
One of my favorite things about being a technologist is constantly learning new things, but, this can lead us to forget about the fundamentals. More importantly, in our pursuit of the latest and greatest things, it's very easy for those of us who teach to forget to reach back and pull others forward. With this in mind, I'm going launch a new blog series called Database Fundamentals. Database Fundamentals The goal here is simple. I'm going to talk about the basics. Creating a database. Creating tables. Inserts, selects, primary keys, and on and on. I have a bunch of material accumulated around these topics. I may as well share it as much as I can. I will continue posting information about all the fun cutting edge stuff I get to…
Under the covers, Azure SQL Database is just good old fashioned SQL Server and this includes Query Store on Azure. While many things can be different when working with Azure, Query Store just isn't one of them. Let's talk about it a bit. Query Store on Azure Unlike your databases created on a SQL Server instance (big iron, VM, hosted VM, wherever), the databases you create on Azure SQL Database have Query Store enabled by default. Managed Instance and Synapse are different. In their case, they operate the same as an instance of SQL Server, off by default. Further, in the single database of Azure SQL Database, you can't, as in can not, disable Query Store. It's on by default and it's staying that way. This leads to a simple…
Moving your database development, deployment and management into a DevOps methodology does involve choosing and implementing tools and tooling. Tools are a necessary aspect of DevOps because, one of the fundamentals of implementing a DevOps approach is automation. To automate, you need the right tools. However, tools and automation, while they represent a lot of work, are actually the easy part of the process of moving into DevOps. What's the hard part? Changing how you do things. Change is Hard One of the fundamental questions you need to learn when you start to implement a DevOps approach consists of a single word: Why. "We always manually run a script in staging prior to running it in production." Well, why? Why can't that be automated? Is there a reason that the…
I'm learning how to speak German. Interestingly enough, you don't start off reading dissertations. Instead, you begin by learning the names of things, Teller for plate, Buch for book. The fundamentals. I'm a third degree black belt in Ken Ryu Kenpo. But you don't start that, or continue it, by learning complex kata. Instead, you start with how to make a fist, how to hold your hands up in a defensive stance. The fundamentals. I've been doing crossfit and Olympic weightlifting for a couple of years now. I've been working hard on my clean, standing up tall during the lift, getting my elbows around quick. The fundamentals. Situation after situation, skill set after skill set, you have to get the fundamentals right. And, if you don't get the fundamentals right,…
CTP 15 utterly hosed the virtual device I had it on. I tried uninstalling, but it just wouldn't come off clean. I finally have rebuilt the virtual and reinstalled everything except VSTSDB GDR. Having learned my lesson (the hard way as usual), I started a differential on my virtual for the install of CTP 16 so that I can roll back and install the release candidate and the release as they come out without having to go through that whole rebuild thing again. While Gert & crew are still making some changes, the fundamentals are still there so my presentation at PASS should work fine as currently defined. The only problem I ran into was that I couldn't get the database to deploy by simply clicking on the deploy menu…
I've posted a number of new videos to the Youtube channel that might be of interest if you're a data professional. First up, I've started migrating my Database Fundamentals posts over to Youtube as SQL Server Fundamentals. The first one is available: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkzj9ZRhbk[/embedyt] Speaking of DBAs, the job is not going away, but it is changing. Find out how to survive the change: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loUwmKQ_Eg4[/embedyt] Would you like to know how the Query Store works? Here's a getting started video: [embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8rBO9R43c[/embedyt] I also have a good video on how to combine capturing query metrics along with wait statistics using Extended Events: [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYyTSxry03A&t=97s[/embedyt] Wait until you see what Trace Flag 7412 can do for you. It's very cool. [embedyt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei2zJwZyRic&t=79s[/embedyt] Finally, if you are interested in attending one of my…
Sjor Takes (b|t) has just barely started blogging, but he's got a great post about a discussion he had with a colleague. It's worth a read. When you get done, I'll provide my answer to the question posed at the start and conclusion of his post. I had a great discussion with one of the smarter people I know late last year. Since I'm going to disagree with this person rather vehemently, I'm going to keep them nameless. We were discussing databases and DevOps and how it relates to the developer, the data professional, specialized DBAs and businesses. It was mostly a great conversation except for this person's opening. This isn't an exact quote, but it paraphrases their beliefs fairly well: The DevOps movement is, intentionally, about getting rid of the…