I’m hosting a webinar tomorrow with Rie Merritt from Microsoft. We’ll be talking about some of the sessions that Microsoft has planned for the PASS Data Community Summit as well as a discussion of how AI is changing our world.
Tag: Redgate
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Friday Flyway Tips: Searching a Migration
This was actually a cool tip I saw internally from one of the product managers, when trying to find specific text in a migration.
I’ve been working with Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.
A Large Project
I’ve got a project in Flyway Desktop that I add to regularly. It doesn’t do anything amazing, but I keep slowly adding objects, with the idea that I want to build up a large project for showcasing different things to customers. You can look at the project here if you are interested.
In my list of migrations, I’ve got a number of migrations, 21 to this point. It is a little hard to read names here, but I’ve named each script to make searching easier. I’ve included a create or alter, a type, and an object name. This helps me use the search box at the top of FWD, which searches migration names.
Most of these are relatively small scripts, one or two objects. A few are a little larger. If I select a particular one (21 as shown below), the code scrolls off the screen. Even if I expand the code listing to take up the entire screen, I can’t see all the code.
More importantly, it can be hard to visually find something in the code. If you’ve ever edited a stored procedure of 100 or more lines, you know what I mean.
One of our PMs pointed out recently that you can use the standard browser CTRL+F if you’ve clicked into the script. I’ve done this below and the search widget pops up at the top of the code. I’ve entered part of an object name here, prod, and you can see this shows 6 matches.
The first one is highlighted in a pale yellow color in the code.
If I click the down (or up) arrows in the search widget, the code jumps around, as it would in a browser. You can see below I’ve jumped down to the 4th occurrence, with the 2nd and 3rd highlighted in an orange(ish) color, while the 4th also has the yellow background bar.
Many of us would perform work on this code in an IDE (SSMS, ADS, etc.), but while managing a project or perhaps evaluating something else, we might want to quickly find something in code in FWD. Perhaps reviewing a change I’m about to commit. USing CTRL+F might be a handy feature.
I do wish the search was more comprehensive at the top, and could dig through all the files in the project, but at least I can search within a file here. Having a good naming convention for migrations also helps me to find the high level purpose for a migration in the list.
Flyway Enterprise
Try Flyway Enterprise out today. If you haven’t worked with Flyway Desktop, download it today. There is a free version that organizes migrations and paid versions with many more features.
If you use Flyway Community, download Flyway Desktop and get a GUI for your migration scripts.
Video Walkthrough
I made a quick video showing this as well. You can watch it below, or check out all the Flyway videos I’ve added:
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Monday Monitor Tip: Compliance Checking for Old Versions
A customer recently wanted to know if any of their instances were too old and out of support. This was for a compliance purpose, and they had the need to show a report to management of when instances were out of compliance with policies.
This post shows how you can do this in Redgate Monitor.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts
Compliance Templates
This is an Enterprise feature, but it allows the administrators of Redgate Monitor to define templates for how the various servers and databases ought to be configured. Deviance from standards, or compliance with standards is often something auditors care about you documenting.
This is very easy with Redgate Monitor. Let’s see how this works.
Under the Security tab (appears in Enterprise edition), you can see there is a Configuration Compliance item. Click this.
This brings up the Configuration Compliance screen. This starts with Servers (highlighted with a bar to denote this tab, but there are also databases and Compliance templates. We want to choose compliance templates.
This tab shows the various templates that exist already in the system. I’m looking at monitor.red-gate.com, which has three templates configured already.
If you scroll to the right, we can see that two of these are server (instance) templates and one is a database template. We can add a new one, or edit existing ones. For this post, I’ll edit the Workload Server template.
After we click Edit, we get another set of tabs for the template itself. The default is for security, but there are also performance and environment options. Pic the Environment tab.
This brings up a list of settings. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see what settings below for Product Level, Product Version, Product version number, and Edition.
In this case, the template is checking that every server has at least SQL Server 2019 Enterprise installed. If any other version were installed, this would show as non compliant. This is useful for grouping your servers by versions.
The values entered here are the ones you would get back from the ServerProperty() function.
Summary
This post shows how you can configure a compliance template to check that the versions of SQL Server you have installed meet your requirements for a version.
Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
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Monday Monitor Tips–Finding CUs for My Instance
How can I quickly get a CU patch for a system that’s out of date? I’ll discuss that situation.
You might think you get to patch every instance every few months, and you may be able to. But most of us have laggards in any decent-sized estate. Someone always wants to avoid patching, or skip patching on the day you’ve scheduled every other system.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts
Tracking Versions
The Estate page in Redgate Monitor contains quite a few different views of your entire estate. This section is designed to aggregate data across all the systems you are monitoring. If I look at https://monitor.red-gate.com/Estate/Versions, I see this as a default.
This gives me an overview of what SQL Server versions I’m monitoring. As you can see, our test estate has a mix of versions, from 2008R2 through 2022 and one Managed Instance. The counts are in the pie chart, and we can see how many are up to date in the bars to the right of each version. As you can see, lots of our estate needs patching.
I can also see at a glance for each version that the latest update is and its release date. The download link is a quick way to download the latest patch from Microsoft. We maintain this list and Redgate Monitor will update it on a regular basis.
When I scroll down, I see the details of individual instances. These are grouped, though I can change that with the toggle in the upper left. For each instance, I have the name and the major version,
The current status and the latest patch are listed next to each other, with an icon and color coding that let’s me know I need to upgrade (yellow up arrow) or I’m patched (green checkmark). I once again have the latest patch, linked to the MS article as well as text that let’s me know how out of date I am. You can see these patches are a month old. Auditors are potentially OK with that.
However, for my 2012 instances, I’m way out of date. No excuse for that. We keep these firewalled and protected, and they are available here only for demonstration purposes.
To the right of this we have our support dates. If a date is past, we mark it with a triangle to let you know that you have unsupported versions. That may or may not be an issue for your organization.
Summary
This section of the Estate tab isn’t something I expect DBAs or sysadmins to check often, but I would schedule a reminder to do this quarterly. Knowing the state of our patching process is important, especially when there are security updates being released. We have had a few in the last year for SQL Server, and it is important to patch and apply those.
Seeing not only the status, but having an easy download link makes this a very handy tab that I wish I’d have had in quite a few jobs during the 90s and early 2000s. If you haven’t checked your estate tab in Redgate Monitor, you might do that today.
Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.
