It’s President’s Day in the US and I have a day off, where I’m coaching volleyball up in Greeley, CO. And slightly worrying what maintenance might be waiting for my back at the ranch.
You get to re-read (and re-comment) on The Change Failure Rate. Interested to see if people view the world differently after a few years.
SQL Server on Linux was released with version 2017. Since then, I’ve seen some deployments of SQL Server on Linux, but many of the customers I work with still deploy SQL Server on Windows. While there are limitations and unsupported features, most of what we need is available in SQL Server on Linux.
I assume most of you out there work on Windows machines against Windows servers. Maybe some of you run containers, but that’s likely a minority. Windows seems to have won the desktop and for most of us running SQL Server, the server room as well.
However, if you use containers, you likely use Linux ones since SQL Server isn’t supported on Windows containers. I know I do, and I like them, but overall, I find I need to know very little Linux to do my job, or even work with the containers.
I like Linux. As someone who learned Unix early on and installed Linux 0.8, I thought at one point I’d spend most of my career in that world. Especially as I worked with DOS and Windows 3.1 in corporate work and found them much less capable. I still remember writing grep.bat and awk.bat files to duplicate some of the things I did in Unix on DOS machines.
For doing database work, most platforms are ported to Windows, but even if you connect to an Oracle/PostgreSQL/MySQL/MongoDB/etc. system running on Linux, do you need much linux? I find that ls, pwd, and cat get me through most of the things I need to do. When there’s something more complex, like sudo systemctl restart mssql-server, there are plenty of code snippets in the docs or some website. These days, you could even ask an AI how to do many simple tasks.
If you don’t use Linux, then you don’t need any, but if you deal with any sort of system running on Linux, how much is important to know? What’s your top ten list of things a newbie should learn? Let us know today.
Steve Jones
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Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.
I don’t know how many of you will be disappointed or impacted by this, but Azure Data Studio (ADS) is being retired, as of 6 Feb, 2025. It will be supported for a little over a year, until 28 Feb, 2026. On one hand I’m not surprised, and on the other, I’m a little shocked by this.
I have written a number of articles on ADS, and shown how things work, as well as pointed out a number of things that don’t work well in the product or its extensions. These pieces have gotten a number of reads, and people have commented on them, so I wonder if there are a lot of you that are upset by this. Is this going to change the way you work? I will say that it will lightly change my work, as I do use ADS to connect to PostgreSQL, but not so much for SQL Server.
I have tried to use ADS, but I just don’t like it. I don’t have a good reason, as it does a lot of what I need from a query tool. I think the port of the query and result experience from a real app like SSMS or Enterprise Manager or even isql/w is just a worse experience. I don’t like the ADS interface and it’s annoying to me.
I suspect that many others feel the same way (other views from Deb and Kevin). They don’t like the ADS experience and prefer SSMS or some other tool. I know there’s been no shortage of complaints over the years about, and finally MS has listened. From first trying to get everyone to leave SSMS to forcing people to install ADS alongside SSMS and now to finally retiring the tool. I think it’s a good decision as people don’t want to lose SSMS and it’s hard to maintain two tools.
We will still have VS Code, which I use often for other purposes. I haven’t spent much time with the mssql extension, but I need to as it’s been updated as of a few months ago and supposedly works better now. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I won’t mourn ADS. It was a tool that had potential. I liked the idea of notebooks, I liked the fast startup. I just wish it were better implemented as a run-a-query-and-get-results application. I wish we had a cross platform editor that was simple and fast, but not one based on VSCode. One that’s written to just manage queries. Maybe they’ll rewrite isql/w in a modern way and port it to Linux.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.
Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.
I saw an interesting thread recently in the SQL Server Community Slack where someone posted about extended events (XE). They were asking about whether XE would have a problem with a situation. The problem wasn’t so interesting, but a quote from one of the responders was. The quote was:
The best time to have learned Extended Events was ten years ago. The second best time is today.
I love that, and I tend to agree. If you need to trace what is happening inside your SQL Server, you need to learn how to capture information with Extended Events. That’s the best way to dig into the details of how queries affect your system.
It’s also hard. I know that whenever I need to use it, which is rare, I have to dig through some articles and docs to understand what thing I need to do. Even having some scripts hasn’t helped because it’s a sufficiently complex system that unless I use it regularly, I forget how all the filters, targets, events, etc. work.
On one hand, I think it’s amazing, and on the other, it’s too hard to use. Even when I try the Extended Events profiler, it’s so different from Profiler that I find myself getting frustrated at times trying to dig through the information.
I am curious how many of you think XE is easy to configure and if you use it often. What are the places it works well? For those of you that don’t use XE or haven’t learned, why not? Do you not have to trace what’s happening with queries in some detail? Or do you have another way that you dive deep into your system? Or do you not have the need?
If you do want to learn more, we have a short Stairway Series on Extended Events to help you get started, as well as a few other articles. If you’re an expert, we’d love a few more on using XE in specific situations.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.
Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.
