Voice of the DBA

Tag: SQLNewBlogger

What Port Should I Use?–#SQLNewBlogger

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

This is a quick post on checking the port for your SQL Server instance. It’s in line with Tim Ford’s request for simple, beginning blog posts this year.

How do you know what port your instance is listening on? Many of you might not know, depending on the SQLBrowser to be running. That’s not necessarily a good idea, as some security protocols insist this be disabled.

There are ways to check. First, you could use a the Configuration Manager. On my desktop, this is in the Manage tool for the computer. Once inside, I can select the Server Network Utility.

Notice that I have multiple instances here, so I need to choose one. Once I do, I see the protocols on the right. In this case, I want to look at the properties of TCP/IP, which is where I’ll get the port.

If I look at properties, I’ll start with the Protocol tab, but I want to switch to the IP Addresses tab. In here, you can see I’ll see an entry for each of the IPs my instance is listening on. I can see which ones are Active as well as the port. In my case, I have these set to dynamic ports.

This doesn’t help. If I had specific ports, I’d see them listed for each IP.

The way I tend to check the specific port is that I will go to the SQL Server Error log.

When I open this up, I see my error log entries. I want to look at the startup of my current session and scroll up slightly. At some point you will see an entry like “Server is listening on…”

In my case, you can see above that I am listening for this instance on 60087. I can verify this with a connection in SSMS.

Note that this is a named instance, and I normally connect to “.\SQL2016”. The SQLBrowser determines the port, since I send the name in, and then get a port back to where I will then connect. However, here the name doesn’t matter. I just send in the port and I can connect.

#SQLNewBlogger

Everyone working with SQL Server should know this. It’s a simple item, like checking the printer is plugged in. Know how to check this.

And blog about it.

December 8, 2016
Hey Posh, Are My Services Running?–#SQLNewBlogger
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

In a previous post, I looked at escaping strings. The reason I needed to do this was that I was trying to do some automatic work with building and starting SQL Server instances. Part of laying the base for this was checking if services are running, and then perhaps taking action, like starting or stopping.

I knew there was a Get-Service command, and ran that. The output from this is much more than I’d like to consume.

I’d like to limit this to SQL Server services. I know there is usually an MSSQLServer service, but since I tend to use named instances, this doesn’t work. Plus, I don’t want to search for just a particular service. I want all services for SQL Server.

There is a Where-Object command, that allows me to search. There is also a –Like option for comparisons. I’ll structure a command like this:
```
Get-Service | Where-Object ($_.Name –Like “SQL*”)
```
That is less than successful.

Why not? Well, PoSh has some syntax requirements and one of them here is that I don’t want parenthesis, I want curly braces. If I change this, things work better.

If you’re older like me and don’t necessarily read small print easily, this might be one that catches you for a bit. However, notice that I only have my SQLAgent and system services, not the core database engine. My wildcard needs work.

Now I see all my services and I can easily decide if I want to stop, start, restart, etc.

#SQLNewBlogger

This was a quick post. It took me 10 minutes to relearn a few PoSh things and practice and then about 5 minutes to write this.

I’ll remember it, and it shows how I’m building my administrative skills. You should do that as well.
December 1, 2016
Escaping a Dollar Sign in PoSh–#SQLNewBlogger

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

I’ve been working more with PowerShell lately and ran into a problem I thought would be easy, but it wasn’t. So I decided to blog what I learned.

Assigning a String

I had a string that I wanted to use in a command. In this case, the Start-Service command. Here’s what I wrote:

Start-Service -Name “SQLAgent$$SQL2016_QA”

This didn’t work, mainly because of this error.

PoSh thinks my string is “SQLAgent\”, not “SQLAgent$SQL2016_QA”. That’s strange, at least to me. Let’s try a variable.

OK, I know I need to escape the dollar sign. I ran a quick Google search, because that’s way quicker than looking through documentation and found a piece on escaping strings. It mentions the backtick (`) as the character to use. Let’s try that.

It works. Now to try to start the service.

No error, but it is it running? Yes.

This is a quick look at string work in PoSh. The more I try to automate work and get things to run themselves, the handier I find PoSh. Since I tend to work with named instances, this was valuable.

#SQLNewBlogger

This was one of those items that I spent about 5-10 minutes figuring out and then another 10 minutes shooting screens and duplicating my work. The writeup was easy, and it will help me remember how to do that in the future.

November 23, 2016
#SQLNewBlogger – T-SQL ESCAPE for Wildcards

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

I ran into a really interesting issue recently. I was working with a table and wanted to determine if the first character of a string was a left bracket. However, I discovered searching for a bracket isn’t as simple as I expected.

Setup

Here’s a mock table and some data.

CREATE TABLE MyData
( myid INT IDENTITY(1,1),
mychar VARCHAR(50)
);
GO

INSERT dbo.MyData
(mychar)
VALUES
(‘This is a string’),
(‘”A Quoted String”‘),
(”’Single quoted string”’),
(”’more single quotes”’),
(‘[My bracketed string]’),
(‘[I like brackets]’),
(‘Can I find [this] string?’)
;
GO

I wanted to return only rows 5 and 6 (based on identity) and not the others. My first thought was that I could just make a simple query.

SELECT myid, mychar FROM mydata WHERE mychar LIKE ‘[%’

The results:

That didn’t work. As soon as I got zero rows, I remembered that brackets allow me to wildcard part of a query. I need to escape the bracket, so I decided to try and do that with a repeating character, as we do with quotes.

Still not working. I searched, and there is an escape character of a backslash as well, but that didn’t help.

Now I was really curious. I checked the page for LIKE, and saw there was an ESCAPE option. I never knew this existed. I read the entry, but then when I looked at the samples, I was slightly confused. Why were they using an exclamation point?

I read further and realized I hadn’t paid close attention. The escape character is the one I want to match up before the character I’m escaping. So I need to escape the trigger I’m going to use in front of the bracket.

This is easier to show than explain. Here’s what I first did.

It looks like I’m escaping the bracket, but then why do I need two of them? If I remove one bracket, this doesn’t work (shown here).

What happens is the first left bracket is a trigger for the compiler to evaluate the next bracket as a literal, not a wildcard. If I replace the first bracket and the parameter with the exclamation point, this makes sense.

It’s not often I’ve had to search for brackets, but checking for percent signs has been common, and this is handy. I can’t believe I’ve never had to do this.

#SQLNewBlogger

Once I played with this in my code, I realized this was a neat function. I mocked up the table and it took longer to just type the words around the code than actually figure things out.

This would be a nice short type of post for those of you that want to show you’ve learned a small thing.

References

LIKE – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms179859.aspx

November 17, 2016