Filtered indexes, Azure AD authentication, and more in Database Weekly (2021-12-11)

Database Weekly for December 11, 2021 Problems displaying this newsletter? [View online](. [Database Weekly]( The Complete Weekly Roundup of SQL Server News by SQLServerCentral.com Hand-picked content to sharpen your professional edge Editorial  One to many SQL Server books Back in the late 90s, I had one large book on my desk with everything I needed – or thought I needed -- to know about SQL Server. It covered T-SQL, installation, backups, security, and more. Over the years, Microsoft has added components like SQL Server Integration Services and features like windowing functions and improved functionality and behavior. Instead of one book, you now need dozens, and it’s likely impossible to become skilled in everything SQL Server has to offer. There are many database engine features, for example, that I’ve never used in a production environment, such as graph database, hierarchy ID, and in-memory OLTP. They are helpful for the right projects and scenarios, but I just haven’t had the opportunity to work on any of them. Even though I haven’t used them in an actual project, I have “played” with many features by following an article or tutorial and watching webinars. If I ever get the opportunity, I’ll know where to start and have some idea of the capabilities. Knowing everything about the platform is not possible, so focusing on specific areas of SQL Server is not a bad idea. Some database professionals have built lucrative careers by specializing in a subset of SQL Server functionality, especially in the analytics space. Many folks specialize in ETL or performance tuning, for example. A few Microsoft data platform community members started with database administration, eventually became business intelligence developers, and ultimately moved to data science. I wonder what’s next! Keeping up with the enhancements and new features in SQL Server is a big challenge, especially as upgrading to new versions is slow for many shops. Throw in Azure SQL, and there’s even more to learn. I like to keep up in my interest areas by writing articles and books or giving presentations. Not everyone wants to do those activities, but maybe organizing a weekly team lunch-and-learn to cover the latest features is doable.   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 [Automating Flyway Undos]( How to auto-generate first-cut undo scripts for every Flyway migration. For every new version of a database created by a Flyway versioned migration, we compare it to a 'source' directory containing object-level build scripts for the previous version. The SQL Compare engine does the rest, producing the associated undo script that will revert the database to the previous version, if required. [Getting Started with Cloud-hosted Databases using Spawn]( This article will get you started with Spawn, a hosted database cloning service running entirely on Amazons AWS. [DBAs at work #3: The finance company Manager DBA]( Want an insight into how your fellow DBAs work? This episode features Kevin Davis, Manager of Database Administration at Tower Loan, a consumer finance company with 250 branches across the US. AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services [Azure Machine Learning – December 2021 general availability]( From Azure Updates A new feature now available in general availability includes Manage Azure Machine Learning resource using Hashicorp Terraform Administration of SQL Server [Configure a Linked Server between SQL Server and PostgreSQL using ODBC drivers]( From SQLShack This article explains configuring a linked server ... [Filtered Indexes Don’t Always Have To Be Selective]( From Erik Darling Data I’ve had quite a bit of luck with filtered indexes over the years. When they work well, they’re absolute aces. [Spread the Love with tempdb]( From Callihan Data We just made it through Thanksgiving dinner and th... [How Long has Your SQL Server Been Online]( From SQLServerCentral Blogs This week’s blog post will help you check your S... [How to view SQL Server Password Configurations]( From SQLServer-DBA.Com Is it possible to check the SQL Server password co... [#SQLServer - Database Cache Suppression]( From sql.sasquatch Third blog post in a quick series about potential ... [How Do You Test IOPs, Latency, and Throughput?]( From Brent Ozar Unlimited You’ve heard these terms thrown around about storage, and you’re not sure what they mean, and how they relate to each other. Let’s make it simpler by using an... [Focus on OLDEST_PAGE as a factor that can delay LOG truncation]( From SQLServer-DBA.Com How do I fix the Oldest_page wait type desc Azure Databricks, Spark and Snowflake [Advent of 2021, Day 5 – Setting up Spark Cluster]( From TomazTsql Series of Apache Spark posts: Dec 01: What is Apa... Azure SQL Database [Azure SQL: Enforcing Azure AD Only Authentication]( From Simple Talk Some time ago I wrote a blog about the just releas... [Options to migrate on-premises SQL Server database to Azure SQL Database]( From MSSQL Tips In this article we look at various ways you can mi... [Azure SQL News Update: A Year in Review]( From Azure SQL Data Exposed streams live regularly to LearnTV. Every 4 weeks, we’ll do a News Update. We’ll include product updates, videos, blogs, etc. as well as upcoming events and things... [Adding Users to Azure SQL Databases]( From MSSQL Tips Learn about the options to add users to Azure SQL Databases including SQL authentication logins, contained SQL users, contained Azure Active Directory users, mapped logins to users - including... Azure SQL Managed Instance [SQL Managed Instances – Failing Over]( From SQLServerCentral Blogs This is our current setup shown below. There is no... [SQL Managed Instance – Failover Groups Quick Tips]( From SQLServerCentral Blogs Lets summarise some important learnings about SQL MI and failover groups. when you add a database to a failover group the secondary database has the same edition / compute... The... Azure Synapse (SQL Data Warehouse and Data Lake) [Implementing Deduplication Logic in the Lakehouse using Synapse Analytics Mapping Data Flow]( From MSSQL Tips Learn how to perform data deduplication for Azure ... Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS) [How to Monitor Microsoft Azure Cloud Security]( From IT Pro - Microsoft Windows Information, Solutions, Tools Security Center is an excellent tool for detecting... [Why Cloud Service Providers Are a Single Point of Failure]( From Dark Reading: Dark Reading News Analysis In a matter of days, a large-scale outage of cloud and other online services could cause $15 billion in losses. [Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server – A new beginning]( From SQLServerCentral Blogs Imagine getting SA (sysadmin) access to your RDS SQL Server Instance! Well, that was not possible in the past, but during AWS re:Invent 2021, Amazon RDS Custom for SQL... The... [AWS US-East Outage Impacts a Wide Range of Sites and Services]( From Petri IT Knowledgebase It almost seems like the headline could have been “AWS Outage Cancels Christmas”. Underlining the pervasive reliance that so many businesses and services have on cloud computing resources like... [Store SQL Server files in Persistent Storage for Azure Container Instances]( From SQLShack In the articles, Deploying Azure Container Instanc... Database Design, Theory and Development [How to return multiple sequence numbers with sp_sequence_get_range]( Developers can work with multiple range values at once using sp_sequence_get_range. Greg Larsen explains how to return multiple sequence numbers with sp_sequence_get_range. Performance Tuning SQL Server [SQL Update statement Performance Tips]( From SQLShack The SQL update statement is used to modify an exis... [SQL Server Execution Plans – Arrow Size]( From Steve Stedman When teaching people about how to use SQL Server E... [Intelligent Query Processing in SQL Server 2022 (Ep.3) | Data Exposed]( From Azure SQL SQL Server 2022 introduces new ground-breaking query performance enhancements under the Intelligent Query Processing family. These make up the latest on Microsoft’s mission to make critical parallel workloads improve... PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI [Troubleshooting Power BI Timeouts, Part 1: The Two/Five Hour Import Refresh Limit]( From Chris Webb's BI Blog Why Power BI refreshes time out after two or five ... [CONVERT, INT, CURRENCY – DAX Guide]( From SQLBI CONVERT: Convert an expression to the specified da... [An overview of Power BI Incremental Refresh]( From SQLShack In this article, we are going to talk about Power ... [Different options to model many-to-many relationships in Power BI and Tabular]( From Sqlbi There are two options to model many-to-many relati... Professional Development [The less you hear from or about the DBAs the better they are doing their job.]( From SQLStudies Something I’ve been thinking about recently is t... Python [Why use Python?]( From MSSQL Tips In this article we look at some examples of why a data professional would want to use Python instead of other tools like Azure Data Factory or Power BI. T-SQL [Using GREATEST and LEAST in Azure SQL Database]( From SQLBlog.org These functions aren't brand new, but they're in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, and they're coming to SQL Server 2022 soon. [Find MAX value from multiple columns in a SQL Server table]( From MSSQL Tips In this article we look at different T-SQL approaches to get the maximum value from multiple columns in a table. [Learn about SQL Joins on Multiple Columns]( From MSSQL Tips Learn about joining SQL Server tables together for a query when there is a need to join on multiple columns. Virtualization and Containers/Kubernetes [How to Reclaim Disk Space from Virtual Machines]( From IT Pro - Microsoft Windows Information, Solutions, Tools Hyper-V admins should focus on four key areas to r... [Public preview availability of Virtual Machine restore points]( From Azure Updates Take multi-disk consistent point in time snapshots...  [RSS Feed]([Twitter]( This email has been sent to {EMAIL}. 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