Voice of the DBA

Tag: SQLNewBlogger

Getting Database Properties – DatabasePropertyEx()
Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

I had someone ask me a question about security recently, and while working through the answer, I ran across something I didn’t know well: databasepropertyex(). Here’s a few notes.

Each database in SQL Server has all sorts of options and settings. Most people (including me) get in the habit of checking here for the information. First we right click the database (after starting SSMS if it isn’t running)

Then you get this dialog, with lots of stuff.

And more on the other tabs.

Time consuming, and error prone. As I get older, I find that trying to decide which selection is set for which option becomes harder. I find my finger tracing across the screen. It’s entirely possible I’d make a mistake when glancing at this to check the ArithAbort setting.

Use T-SQL

Scripting and querying is usually better. Not the sp_configure scripting where you get a whole list of options, but looking for a particular item. That’s where DatabasePropertyEx() comes in. This lets you query for a database property.

The problem comes in when you run it. If you run the function, you get little information.

Certainly you can go look at BOL to get more data, but that’s annoying. If I run sp_configure, I get data. However here, nothing. Even if I do what I think would be helpful, with a NULL parameter, I don’t get a list of stuff. SQL Prompt alerted me to the fact that the first parameter is the database, and the second is the property, but that doesn’t work.

Fortunately, I have SQL Prompt, so I get this when I put in quotes for the second parameter.

As you can see, the parameters don’t map to the properties, though you can figure out what they mean if you see them. They tend to follow the conventions that most application programmers use (IsAutoClose).

That’s fine, and it just means you need to have a reference handy for properties to query. I wish MS would give all properties with a NULL parameter, or a link to BOL.

Writing

This one took a bit longer to write. Once I realized I didn’t know databasepropertyex() very well, I had to read about it (5 minutes) and experiment a bit. I took some screen shots, which is always cumbersome. As I wrote this, I had to change the wording and ordering a few times to try and convey a simple message. I was originally going to look at more details, but decided to keep this simple and talk about just querying properties.

This was about 30-40 minutes for me.

You can do this. Join the #SQLNewBlogger group and start documenting your career. You can see all my posts that fall into this area by looking through the SQLNewBlogger tag here.

References
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186823.aspx
May 14, 2015
April Blogger Challenge 4–Filtered Index Limitations
The April Blogger Challenge is from Ed Leighton-Dick and aimed at new bloggers, but anyone is welcome. I’m trying to motivate and cheer people on.

Filtered Index Limits

I ran across a limitation recently with filtered indexes and was surprised. Apparently, you can’t make complex filters in your definitions.

In the last post, I wrote about creating a filtered index on gender, looking for non-null columns in a table. That code looked like this:
```
CREATE INDEX Users_Gender_Filtered
  ON Users (gender)
  WHERE gender IS NOT NULL;
```
However, what if I find that I have lots of NULL values, but also lots of spaces, ‘ ‘, in my table because this is an optional field, and the data entry code changed at some point. Neither of these rows actually helps me in finding the rows with an ‘M’ or a ‘F’.

I tried creating an index like this:
```
CREATE INDEX Users_Gender_Filtered2
 ON Users (gender)
  WHERE gender IS NOT NULL OR gender = ' ';
```
That didn’t work, so I tried parenthesis.
```
CREATE INDEX Users_Gender_Filtered2
 ON Users (gender)
  WHERE (gender IS NOT NULL OR gender = ' ');
```
That didn’t work either. No matter how I moved parens around, they didn’t allow a complex (if two criteria are “complex”) filtered index.

This is a limitation of a filtered index right now. I’m not sure if it will be changed, though I would like it to be. There are other limitations, so read the docs carefully, and think about what might work well in your environment.

References

A few places I used to research this post.
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280372.aspx
- https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/introduction-to-sql-server-filtered-indexes/
Quick and Easy Blogging

This post occurred to me while I was writing some code. I mocked up a table in about 2 minutes, and then ran a quick search on the Internet. Reading a few links was about 10 minutes and then testing the code (including dropping the table and recreating it a few times) was less than 5 minutes. All told, I solidified some knowledge and completed this in about 20 minutes. I also have drafts and ideas from this post for 2 other posts that cover this same topic in a similar way.

Look for the other posts in the April challenge.
April 30, 2015
The May Blogger Challenge–Continuing On
Last month I participated in Ed Leighton-Dick’s April Challenge. My four posts were tagged the April Challenge, and this month I plan to continue, and hopefully get a few more people to up their blogging.

Building on April

To make the next step in starting to blog regularly, I’d like to see people in May continue with their weekly blogging, but do one more thing: write one additional post.

This additional post I’d like to be one of the T-SQL Tuesday topics. Pick one from the list of past choices and write a post. Feel free to title it with the T-SQL Tuesday number and post it. It really doesn’t matter when you wrote it. The whole idea is to just write.

Getting Started in May

If you didn’t participate, or you struggled to get 4 posts, get started in May. Write one post per week and publish it. You can tag it the #SQLNewBlogger or you can just send a note to myself or Ed. We’d like to know what you’re doing.

If you struggle to write, do one of these two things:
- Make a note, send yourself an email, whatever, when you close a ticket or complete a section of code.
- Use one of my topics
Either one of these things work. I’d prefer you do the first one and just make a note when you do something. I’m sure you do something at work. Maybe it’s check logs, maybe it’s solve a problem with an instance, maybe it’s write a report. Anytime you do something, make a note.

Then write about that note in a weekly session.

If you are still struggling for topics, here are a few that I’d like to see you tackle in May:
- Where do you use a unique index?
- Generate a script after adding a column in the SSMS table designer
- Query for the list of recent full backups in msdb for a single database
- Show how to join two tables.
Pick one and write. Set aside a 15 minute session a week to write, and work on a short, < 1 page, post.

Good luck, and hope to see you blogging in May.
April 27, 2015
April Blogger Challenge 3 – Filtered Indexes
The April Blogger Challenge is from Ed Leighton-Dick and aimed at new bloggers, but anyone is welcome. I’m trying to motivate and cheer people on.

Why Filtered Indexes

I haven’t used filtered indexes much in my career as they didn’t exist while I was a full time SQL developer and DBA. They appeared in SQL Server 2008, and are a very useful feature in certain circumstances.

Imagine I have a simple table:

CREATE TABLE Users ( MyID int IDENTITY(1, 1) , firstname varchar(250) , lastname varchar(250) CONSTRAINT pkUsers PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (firstname, lastname) , gender char(1) , postalcode varchar(12) , contactphone varchar(12) ); GO

I want to add some indexes that look for specific fields since those are times I am limiting searching in the table. For example, suppose that gender is an optional entry by users. I find that I often have NULL in this column, so I create a filtered index.

I’ll do that as follows:
```
CREATE INDEX Users_Gender_Filtered 
   ON Users (gender) 
   WHERE gender IS NOT NULL;
```
This is the same type of index statement we normally use, but we’ve added a WHERE clause to the statement. This means that only those rows with a non-NULL value in the gender column will be included in this index.

Why Use Filtered Indexes?

There are some reasons given in the BOL article below, but the main reason to do this is performance. I could easily add an index using gender that isn’t filtered, but if I had 1.5mm rows in my table and 1.4mm of them have NULL here, then do I want to scan those 1.4mm rows if a query wants a specific gender? I don’t.

Indexes take space, which means more space on disk, more backup space, and more time for backups. However they also impact performance when we read the index, or we update a column used in an index. Each of those operations requires either a read or write of the index. If I can reduce the reads and writes to indexes, then I can improve performance dramatically.

I would urge you to look at filtered indexes whenever you have data where a large number of rows are not going to match a query. In these cases, you can use a filtered index that is highly selective.

References

A few places I used to research this post.
- https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280372.aspx
- https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/introduction-to-sql-server-filtered-indexes/
Quick and Easy Blogging

This post occurred to me while I was writing some code and was the first post I thought of for the challenge. However I realized I could start with the other posts, and so I wrote those posts first. This one took about 10 minutes to read through limits on filtered indexes, try 4-5 experiments to get the code to work, and write the post.

Look for the other posts in the April challenge.
April 16, 2015