Categories
T-SQL Tuesday

T-SQL Tuesday #176 – One Piece of Advice You Wish Past You Had

This month’s invitation from Louis looks for One piece of advice you wish your past self had. T-SQL Tuesday #149 had a similar topic where we gave advice to our younger selves and I made a few points. With a little more experience, I wanted to distill a couple of those: Sharing (knowledge)is caring (for yourself) Within a business, sharing […]

Categories
Azure

Reducing Azure Function Spend with Consumption Plans

A consumption based App Service Plan in Azure provides us with a pay-as-you-go model for Function usage. This can help reduce spend from Premium plans where those plans exceed the requirements of the function, for example low volume or intermittent work. Unfortunately you can’t move a Premium plan to Consumption based via the portal. Instead […]

Categories
Azure Data Factory

Debugging Failed Function Calls in Data Factory

I recently ran into an issue when trying to call a function from an ADF pipeline. The function returned a generic Internal Server Error with no details exposed. Here we’ll look at how to dig into the logs to identify the true cause of the failure. In this instance the function was performing PGP encryption […]

Categories
Azure

Retaining Job History in Managed Instances

In a Managed Instance, the SQL Agent job history is fixed at 1000 records or 100 records per job. This isn’t configurable like a regular SQL Server install. So how can we maintain a history of these if we want to retain those records? There are 3 approaches which could be worth considering. Two of […]

Categories
SSIS

Securing SSIS Configuration with Sensitive Parameters

Configuring SSIS projects or packages can necessitate parametering information which may include sensitive values such as authentication details. Parameters are stored as plain text in the database by default. We’ll demonstrate how to protect these values using Sensitive parameters. The problem With a SSIS project deployed, our parameters are stored in plain text in the […]

Categories
SSIS

Configuring SSIS with Environment Variables

Yep it’s more SSIS again this week. Here we’ll be looking at using Environment configuration within the SSIS catalog. This allows sets of parameters to be defined and used across multiple projects and packages which share common values. This approach can either be used as a central point for configuration, or you could use multiple […]

Categories
SSIS

Managing SSIS Parameters in Visual Studio

Last week we looked at project parameters in SSIS to help us configure our projects. This can help us to tailor the project to the package its in for example. Here we’ll look at using Configurations within Visual Studio to manage those parameters for multiple environments. Configuring parameters We’ll start out with the project used last time […]

Categories
SSIS

Building SSIS Project Configuration

Last week we looked at configuring SSIS packages using package configuration. This week we’ll look at another approach for configuration: Project Configuration Project Configuration is the standard way to configure projects. This took over from the legacy approach which we looked at last week. This method allows us to share common parameters and connections across an […]

Categories
SSIS

Controlling SSIS with Package Configuration

Configurations for Integration Services packages allow us to tailor their execution without needing to redeploy. There are two main ways to manage these configurations – Package Configuration and Project Configuration. In this post we’ll look at the Package Configuration approach. Package deployment The ability to use Package Configuration is only available when the project is […]

Categories
SQL

Revisiting Object Dependencies

Last week we looked at identifying object dependencies through performing a wildcard search on the objects such as procedures. I noted another option could be to use the views such as sys.sql_expression_dependencies and Kevin also commented about using the supporting functions such as sys.dm_sql_referencing_entities. I wanted to briefly look at both of these options and look at how their results can […]