Voice of the DBA

Tag: syndicated

A New Word: Proluctance

proluctance – n. the paradoxical urge to avoid doing something you’ve been looking forward to – opening a decisive letter, meeting up with a friend who’s finally back in town, reading a new book from your favorite author – perpetually waiting around for the right state of mind, stretching out the bliss of anticipation as long as you can.

Sometimes the anticipation of something, good or bad, is more impactful than the thing. I certainly can understand not wanting to take a call or open a letter because the result might not be positive, or what I wanted.

The one place I certainly see this is with books. I have a few authors that I just buy their new books, often pre-ordering them. Lee Child is one and I often pre-order his books weeks or months in advance. However, when they come, I don’t always start reading them.

Sometimes I might be in the middle of something else, but quite a few times I’ve saved the book for my next long flight. I tend to take a 4+ (or often 8+) hour flight every quarter, so I’ve saved a few books until I knew I’d be stuck in a seat. In fact, the latest one, The Secret, was one of those. It came in late Oct 2023, and I knew I had a few trips scheduled in the next few weeks, so I delayed reading this until I was headed to the PASS Summit in November.

To help build my own anticipation and feed my proluctance, I re-read a couple of his older books in the meantime

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

February 23, 2024
Adding Git LFS Support – #SQLNewBlogger
I got this message recently while committing some changes:

This post shows my work in adding Git LFS support to GitHub.

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers. You can see all posts on Git as well.

Downloading Git LFS

The first thing to do is follow the URL from above: https://git-lfs.com/

Once there, I clicked the download link. I also saw this message: Git LFS security update: Windows users should update to 3.1.3 or newer. I had never installed this, but there is a security issue, so if you are using this, or know someone, let them know to patch.

This is a simple install, so I ran it and the installed quickly completed. There are no choices here, just accept the EULA.

Once this is done, I followed the instructions from the site. First, I had to close and re-open my CMD window to detect this. Once I did this, I could run
```
git lfs install
```
This worked fine.

Once this was done, I changed to one of my repos where I have a large PowerPoint file. I added this for a conference that didn’t have download support, but I may do this in other repos to make it easy for attendees to see code and PPT together.

In the repo, I added lfs tracking for all PPTXs. I likely will add a few other decks in here for different conferences, so I’ll includes this as a general tracking item.

This alters the .gitattributes file, so that needs to be tracked and added to the repo. I’ll do that and commit my changes.

There you go. I’m not commited and tracking large files, or at least PPTXs with lfs support. Hopefully my laptop survives as I did this on an airplane :).

What is LFS Support?

This is an extension to git that makes storing large binary files, and diffing them, more efficient. Large files can be inefficient to transfer and store compared to small files, and many file systems, and tools, sometimes adjust the way they work to manage these differently. SQL Server did this with FileStream/FileTable, which works well for some sizes of files, but it inefficient for others. In fact, if you have smaller files (< 256kb I think), those are better just stored in varbinary columns and streamed through TDS.

The extension says this should allow you to keep your repo at a more manageable size. I’m assuming this means some sort of compression and diff storage for binaries, as opposed to complete copies of the entire file(s). This should be faster to push/pull as well.

SQL New Blogger

This post was interesting to me. As soon as I realized this was something that might improve the way git works for me, I decide to shoot some screenshots as I enabled this. I downloaded the binary and sketched a few sentences on this post before I got on a plane.

I’d saved the web page for the extension, and so I took about 15 minutes to do the install, shoot the screens, and then type up the above description.

This is s a good example of adding something to my development toolbox that might benefit my team, and make it easier for others do deal with large binary files. You can do this as well to show you’re learning and growing. Even more bonus points if you go through your IT group for permission, document some of those interactions, and show that you know how to work with other teams.

Fortunately, I don’t need to do that as this isn’t a domain managed laptop 😉
February 21, 2024
A New Word:Maugry

maugry – adj. afraid that you’ve been mentally deranged all your life and everybody around you knows, but none of them mention it to you directly because they feel it’s not their place.

I don’t know that I quite feel maugry, though I certainly sometimes wonder if I view the world much differently (and strangely) than others. I certainly think in polite society that others often won’t point out something that others do or say that is very strange.

I also like to think that often I have lots of empathy and understanding of how others view the world, though maybe that means I am actually deranged from others’ point of view and I should feel maugry.

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

February 16, 2024
Friday Flyway Tips–Capture the Filegroup for Tables
A customer asked recently why Flyway doesn’t detect the filegroup for some changes. I showed them it does and decided to write a post on this.

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.

Setting Up Filegroups

I don’t see a lot of SQL Server databases using filegroups. They can be helpful, and they can create complexity, but they aren’t good or bad. Some people use them, and for various reasons. If you use them, you’ve probably run some code like this:
```
ALTER DATABASE [EngineRoomDemo_1_Dev] ADD FILEGROUP [indexes]
GO
ALTER DATABASE [EngineRoomDemo_1_Dev] ADD FILE ( NAME = N'index1', FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\shadow_index1.ndf' , SIZE = 8192KB , FILEGROWTH = 65536KB ) TO FILEGROUP [indexes]
GO
```
Here I’ve added a new filegroup, called indexes, and a file in this group. This isn’t set as the default.

Since I’m working with Flyway Enterprise and generating scripts, I do need to also alter my shadow database, so that I can both detect changes and also verify my scripts. I’ll use this code:
```
ALTER DATABASE [EngineRoomDemo_1_Dev_Shadow] ADD FILEGROUP [indexes]
GO
ALTER DATABASE [EngineRoomDemo_1_Dev_Shadow] ADD FILE ( NAME = N'index1', FILENAME = N'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL15.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\shadow_index1.ndf' , SIZE = 8192KB , FILEGROWTH = 65536KB ) TO FILEGROUP [indexes]
GO
```
Now we can detect changes.

Detecting Table Changes

First, let’s actually create a new table on this filegroup. To do that, I create a table, but I add an ON clause, as shown here. After the table creation, I use ON with the name of the filegroup. This ensures this table exists on the file(s) for this filegroup.
```
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[newtable](
     [myid] [int] NULL,
     [mychar] [varchar](20) NULL
) ON [indexes]
GO
```
Once this is done, I can go to Flyway Desktop and detect the change. When my schema model refreshes, I see the change, but no filegroup.

Hmmm, what’s wrong?

By default SQL Compare ignores filegroup information. If I click the Comparison options button, I get a dialog.

In here, go to the Comparison options dialog and type “file”. Hopefully the lower option below will be fixed to say “filegroups” and also add commas soon (sorry, I’m an editor).

We ignore these by default, so I’ll uncheck the lower box.

I’ll save this and refresh my schema model. Now I see the proper script with the ON clause.

Problem solved. If I care about where objects are created, I now have the filegroup location captured as part of my code.

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.

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:
February 16, 2024