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Very Hot Patches

"At best it would crash" is not a phrase I'd like to have to use as a data professional. That's a quote from an article that the Azure team wrote about hot patching SQL Server. While this sounds very scary, it's actually something being used now to patch the SQL Server code running Azure SQL Database.

Years ago I read a book where the hero was a programmer that had to alter and hack into live code on a mainframe, making changes to thwart the villains. It was a neat concept, and certainly daunting. As someone that had to write assembly code at one point, I had trouble keeping track of instructions when I could map them out on paper. Doing this on live code would be very scary.

The SQL Server code is not being changed live by a human, but code is being patched without stopping the sqlsrvr.exe process in Azure. There is a blog on the hot patching process, which I appreciate, though I'm not completely sure I get the minute technical details. Still, it's an impressive feat of engineering to me, and this does make me wonder to what extent platform engineers might structure their code to allow more of this in the future.

Deploying changes is already a challenge for many of us with database code. Making changes, evolving our schema and adding functionality without downtime or excessive blocking is a challenge. Many customers that look to move to a database DevOps software development process often assume that our tools will just do this for them. They won't, because any DevOps tools that help with automation don't magically get around the limitations and restrictions that Microsoft has built into the platform.

Making changes in real time, without interrupting workloads involve some engineering challenges, but whether at the SQL Server platform level or the database code level, they are possible. It takes some work, some flexibility, and more importantly, some understanding of how changes can be made and the patterns that enable uninterrupted changes. There is often a space and time trade-off, and certainly no magic, though to our customers, it might appear that way if we do our jobs well.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

Redgate University
 
 Featured Contents

A Spectacular Case of 100% CPU Caused by Online Reindexing

viktorgr 14242 from SQLServerCentral.com

An investigation of a serious performance issue during online re-indexing on a production server leads us to

interesting discoveries and solutions.

Integrating SQL Server Tools into SQL Change Automation Deployments

Additional Articles from Redgate

Phil Factor shows how to integrate use of SQL Change Automation, SSMS registered servers, SMO, and BCP to automatically build or update a database on all servers in a group.

Implementing SQL Server Integration Services with Azure Data Factory

Additional Articles from Database Journal

Azure SQL Database, unlike its on-premises counterparts, restricted its integration capabilities to those implemented directly by the database engine. To remediate this shortcoming, Microsoft provided equivalent functionality by relying on integration runtime of Azure Data Factory. In this article, you get an overview of this Azure-based SSIS offering.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Power BI for Communication and Marketing

Meagan Longoria from Data Savvy

We often focus on deep analysis and insights generated by machine learning when we talk about Power BI these days because it’s super cool and very fancy. But I...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Graph – Shortest Path

Diligentdba 46159 from Mala's Data Blog

‘Shortest path’ is by far the most feature of SQL Graph for now. What does this even mean? ‘Shortest path’ is the term accorded to the shortest distance between...

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

Indexing A Numeric Computed Column

I have a table with a column defined like this: 
SalePrice NUMERIC(10,4)
I then created a computed column on this field: 
ALTER TABLE dbo.MonthlySales ADD EstSalePrice AS ROUND(SalePrice, 0)
I want to index this column with the following code. 
CREATE INDEX MonthlySales_EstSalePrice ON dbo.MonthlySales (EstSalePrice)
What happens when I run this?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Default Agent Error Logs

How many SQL Server Agent error logs are kept by default?

Answer: 9

Explanation: There are nine error logs maintained by default. Ref: SQL Server Agent Error Log - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/agent/sql-server-agent-error-log?view=sql-server-2017

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

SQL Server 2017 - Administration
ANGEL****https://livelwatch.com/golovkinboxingfight-live/ - dsadfedehttps://livelwatch.com/gggvsderevyanchenkoboxingfight-live/ https://livelwatch.com/watchgggvsderevyanchenkoonline/ https://livelwatch.com/gggboxingfight-live/ https://livelwatch.com/golovkinboxingfight-live/ https://livelwatch.com/golovkinvsderevyanchenko/ https://livelwatch.com/derevyanchenkoboxingfight-live/ https://livelwatch.com/golovkinvsderevyanchenkofreeonline/ https://livelwatch.com/golovkinvsderevyanchenko-live/ https://livelwatch.com/gggvsderevyanchenko-live/ https://livelwatch.com/derevyanchenkovsgolovkin/ https://livelwatch.com/derevyanchenkovsgolovkin-live/ https://livelwatch.com/gggvsderevyanchenko/ https://livelwatch.com/gggvsderevyanchenkolivestream/ https://livelwatch.com/gennadiygolovkinvssergiyderevyanchenko-live/ https://livelwatch.com/sergiyderevyanchenkovsgennadiygolovkin/ GGG vs Derevyanchenko Boxing Fight Live Watch GGG vs Derevyanchenko Online Live https://liveswatchlive.com/gggboxingfight-live/OSAKA*____*https://live-gamei.com/golovkinvsderevyanchenko-live/ Golovkin Boxing Fight Live Golovkin vs Derevyanchenko Live Derevyanchenko Boxing Fight Live Golovkin vs Derevyanchenko Free Online Live Golovkin vs Derevyanchenko Live GGG vs Derevyanchenko Live Derevyanchenko […]
Job History Data - Hey, I'm trying to figure out why I'm only seeing 4 days of history on my backup job with exec sp_help_jobhistory.  I'd like to see 15 days.  I use Ola Hollengren's backup and I have my cleanup time set to 168 hours, but I think that is for cleaning up the backup files themselves and […]
SQL Server 2017 - Development
Insert forum posts/threads in the DB table - I would like to insert a forum posts/threads in the database and then be able to manipulate them. What programming language do I need to use to insert these posts/threads in the database table?
How to return lowest level parts from BOM - i am trying to sort out a recursive CTE that expands a bill of Materials. I am trying to get just the lowest level parts to create a Shopping List. The cte works okay but how do I return just the lowest level parts and not the intermediate parts?
SQL Server 2016 - Administration
Error while creating clustered index - Hi Experts, While trying to create a clustered idx on a HEAP Table, we are seeing below error. How to avoid this error. This Table is originally a HEAP and now we wanted to remove fragmentation (~25Gb), so tried creating clustered on this table using SSMS. It is throwing Timeout error. How to fix this? […]
rebuild is failing - Hi Experts, One of the HEAP table rebuild operation is failing in one of our dev env. Have some few questions, kindly help. >ALTER TABLE HeapTbl REBUILD; There is a HEAP table which has 88% fragmentation and it is around ~25GB. The table also contains LOB datatypes columns as well. When we try to rebuild […]
Vendor recommendations - Looking for which option for stats update would be best - Running SQL 2016 Enterprise on Windows 2016 We upgraded to a new version of this product and having slowness issues. The vendor keeps running their tool and tells us sample percentage needs to be 100% for all statistics. The problem is the auto update statistics keeps updating them and so they are not 100% We […]
partition table design issue - Hello there - really need help with a design issue for partitioning. Almost all examples I've seen uses dates, but in this case, I'm partitioning based on a Part ID or group of Part IDs and having problems figuring out how to add a new filegroup to a scheme properly upon the movement of a […]
SQL Server 2016 SP2 CU9 - WFC Failover failing - Could someone please help me with this question? Originally posted on: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/250187/sql-server-2016-sp2-cu9-wfc-failover-failing I have updated my SQL Server 2016 on one of my Windows Failover Cluster nodes successfully. When I attempted to failover one of my SQL instances onto the newly patched node, SQL Server service fails to come online. These are the errors that […]
SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL
MSDTC issue on SQL Server clusters - Dear All, I have sql server 2016 with 5 clustered instances on the box. We are using Local DTC for these. currently we have DB's on 2 of these instances. But problem is MSDTC is working on only 1 instance at a time. When we reboot the server, the issue is resolved on 1 instance, […]
Administration - SQL Server 2014
error while adding db back to always on - Hi, we configured alwayson with 15 dbs in sql 2014. we configured full,diff and log backups. due to some reason the yesterday all log backups failed. due to this the logs grown hugely. i fixed the log backup drive.after taking continuous log backups and shrinking the log files three of the dbs logs were huge […]
SQL 2012 - General
SQL query to return only voided records unless they exists once - Hi i am running: PL/SQL Developer Version 9.0.4 Oracle database 12C   My issue is that i cant figure out how to make a query that will keep all the green records but exclude the red one,  we have had some unfortunate registrations in our DB so instead om people moving records they have used […]
SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL
Checking if a value has been set/changed in week/month from audit table - Greetings, I'm struggling to find a solution to find when a value is set or changed to specific value (12 in the supplied example) within a time period (month for instance). Unfortunately the audit table, holds many different status values, with a new record written any time one the status column values change. It could […]
Reporting Services
Label Printing (Contacts) - Dynamics 365 Online - Greetings! I am using MS Dynamics 365 CRM online and I need to achieve label printing functionality to print name and address of contacts from my table in to MS Word using SSRS. This after proof reading will be printed on a pre-designed A4 size stationery that has 10 rows and 3 columns and can […]
Reporting Services 2008 Development
Move column data from "main record" to another row - This report contains a patient's antibiotic dose along with the two most recent lab results. The two lab results cause a duplicate row with the patient's antibiotic information. I want the report to only list one record for the antibiotic and then on a separate row(s), have the lab results. See image. The yellow highlighted […]
 

 

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