Voice of the DBA

Tag: SQLNewBlogger

Create a BACPAC–#SQLNewBlogger

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

One of the things that you might encounter at some point is the need to create a BACPAC. This is essentially a DACPAC with data included. There are times you might find a BACPAC more convenient than a full backup, especially if you work with Azure.

This post shows how you can create a BACPPAC file (with the extension .bacpac) from SSMS.

I have a small database, the PartsUnlimited database, from the Microsoft PartsUnlimited demo application. I want to create a BACPAC from this, however, when I right click and select Tasks, there is no “Create BACPAC” option.

That’s fine, because the “Data Tier Application” is the DAC, and an export includes the data, which creates the BAC part of the process. Let’s choose “Export Data-tier Application”. Once we do that, we get the expected summary wizard screen to start.

I click next and immediately get prompted for a location in which to save the file. The will include all your data, so choose a location that has sufficient disk space. You have the option to also store this in Azure if needed.

Note the filename above is already filled out by default, but you can change this in the edit box. If you click the “Advanced” tab, you’ll get the chance to select only certain tables if that is required. You can see this dialog below.

Once you’ve chosen a location, you click next and get a summary page.

Click finish, and the process starts. This runs very quickly, extracting the schema and then all the data, noting the results of each object.

That’s it. If I look in the location, I’ll see my BACPAC file.

I can copy this to another machine and import it to recreate a database. We’ll do that in another post.

SQLNewBlogger

A short, quick post. I’ve done this before, but I had to do this for a quick process and took 5 extra minutes to take screen shots, spending 5 minutes later writing this up.

March 15, 2017
Create a DACPAC to Move Databases–#SQLNewBlogger

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

In my last post, I talked about what a DACPAC was. Now let’s create one. This turns out to be about as simple as it could be. First, let’s choose a database. In my case, I’ll use the PartsUnlimited database on my SQL Server 2016 instance. I’ll start by right clicking the database and selecting “Tasks”.

Down near the bottom there is an “Extract Data-tier Application” entry. Choose that. Once you do, you should get a wizard screen. We’ll click past the first screen.

Next we need to set the properties of the DACPAC we are building. The application name is usually the database. The version can be anything, but ideally you are versioning your database in some way. Most people don’t, so they can leave this as 1.0.0.0. If you are actually building your database somehow, you ought to be using a CI process and have some version number. Ideally you’d keep this somewhere in the db and rev it.

We also need to include an optional description and a path to the file. I’ll leave the defaults, but feel free to change these as needed.

The next screen is a summary. If everything looks OK, click Next. This will start the creation of the .DACPAC.

The final screen will show progress, which is fairly short and simple. I think this has always worked for me. If I click the “Finish” button at the bottom (not shown), the dialog disappears.

If I go to the file location, I’ll see my DACPAC in the filesystem. The file is recognized as an SSMS file, and in another post we’ll look at how we unpack this.

I can check this file, however, to be sure there is something inside it. This is a zip file, and if I open it in 7-Zip, I see this:

Opening the model.xml file, I see data that seems like it describes my database. I talked about this in my previous post.

There, a simple DACPAC. This is a format Microsoft uses, and while it’s not perfect, at least I now know how to build one.

SQLNewBlogger

This post really took me about 10 minutes, across a few days. I started it after building a DACPAC, and taking the screenshots, but I didn’t have time to write it. I finally spent the other 6 or so minutes putting these words down the next week.

A quick showcase of something I learned.

March 8, 2017
Implicit Time Conversions – #SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

I was trying to work with times recently and needed to get the current time. I thought, well, Getdate(), or better yet, SysDateTime() will give me a date and time, but what about the time?

A simple experiment showed it’s easy:
```
DECLARE
    @t TIME,
    @t1 TIME;
SELECT @t = SYSDATETIME(), @t1 = GETDATE();
SELECT @t, @t1;
```
I got this:

Quick, easy, and what I suspected would work. If you need to work with times, you can easily cast a datetime value to a TIME to strip the date, or just assign the values to a time.
```
CREATE TABLE TimeTest
(t TIME)
GO
INSERT TimeTest
SELECT top 10
 CreationDate
 FROM dbo.Posts
 GO
 SELECT top 10
  *
  FROM dbo.TimeTest
GO
DROP TABLE TimeTest
```
This code takes a datetime column and just inserts the time into the new table.

SQLNewBlogger

Literally about 3 minutes of my day to write this. When you learn something, write it down.
March 2, 2017
What’s a DACPAC and a BACPAC?

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

If you’ve worked with SQL Server development and database projects, you might have heard about DACPACs. However, if you haven’t, this was a concept that didn’t seem to catch on with many companies. I’m not a fan of the format, but it works and you should be aware of what a DACPAC is and how it can be used.

The DAC part of the moniker is show for Data-tier Application. This is the container that includes all of the object definitions for the objects that are contained inside of the DACPAC. The PAC part is just an easy way to note this is a contained in a compressed format.

In fact, the .DACPAC is a zip file. If I rename one of them, I can open is like any other zip file. Here’s one I’ve added a .zip to the end of and opened in Windows Explorer. There are a few files in here.

The only really important one is the model.xml, which is a model of my objects. If I look inside, it’s a cumbersome XML format, but I can easily see my Order table as a part of the file.

These are useful files for having a machine read the format and reproduce database objects in a live database. SQLPackage.exe will do this, as will other tools such as a the DacFX (Data-tier Application Framework).

I don’t love the format, but it is machine readable and can allow you to package and deploy database changes. There are limitations, especially between versions, and I think that it’s harder to understand than the formats that SQL Compare (From my company, Redgate Software) uses, but that’s me. I’m biased, but I don’t love DACPACs.

In any case, you can right click and “Unpack” this, or use SSMS to create and read them into a database. In the next post, I’ll show how that works.

What’s a BACPAC?

That’s easy. It’s a DACPAC with the data included.

February 22, 2017