The Ashdar Partners Blog

Recently, Microsoft announced that they will be sunsetting Azure Data Studio (ADS).  In other words, ADS is off to Software Valhalla, where it will join Query Analyzer and SQL Enterprise Manager. (And SQL Server for Itanium and SQL Server for Alpha and Multiplan and Professional Development System and QuickBasic and QuickC and many, many other things (Microsoft or not) that exist only as memories.) This announcement  was a bummer, but I was surprised at my lack of surprise. It was more of a "yeah, I guess that makes sense" rather than a "oh, wait-what?" or "I thought they were going to get rid of SSMS". Remember when Microsoft helpfully (?) installed ADS when you installed SSMS? I've been using SSMS since SQL Server 2005 When I started working with SQL Server, I used Query Analyzer because that is what was available. Which means that I used Query Analyzer for about six or seven years. How could it have been that long? No one remembers good old QA anymo...

I hope that you are all safe in this time of COVID. I am (slowly) working through the "Automate the Boring Things (with Python)" class over at Udemy. I am keeping my code/notes/experiments in an open GitHub repository . You can read my raw files and see how I think when I write programs in a language I am not at all familiar with. I have also been (slowly) updating my old "Tools I use" wiki at github . This includes things like programmer's editors and some of the languages I have used over the decades.

Lately, I have been trying to up my game a bit and one of the things I am doing is using some of the latest tools and bits of things. (Partly, this is because I have been working with some old technology lately and I am feeling "dated". Ask me about Fox Pro, if you dare.) PowerShell After many years of not seeing value in updating, I am moving to PowerShell 6. (Version 6.2, specifically.) Frankly, more things work than I expected. I haven't seen any performance regressions and things have gone smoothly. I think I spent more time incorporating the PowerShell version into my Prompt function than anything else that I had to do because of the upgrade. SSMS I am running the absolutely-latest build of SSMS. I skipped some SSMS builds when the removed the diagramming functionality. Now that it has been put back into the product, I am on the update train again. Aside: The diagramming feature isn't awesome but it is easy to use, requires no installation, doesn't ...

(Actually, they are up to version 1.0.2 already.) I've been using DbaTools for a number of years. I have come to rely on it more and more. Now, I find it at least as deeply entwined in my PowerShell code as the SqlServer module is. All right-thinking people use DbaTools. And you should, too. More seriously, DbaTools is one of the few PowerShell modules I absolutely rely on, on a daily basis. I use DbaTools so frequently that I can't easily categorize it all. In short, I can: Check servers, instances, databases, disks, security and many other things for issues on a daily basis Check business rules on a daily basis Restore databases to test environments on an ad-hoc basis. I have this working so smoothly that I forget that I have Ola Hallengren's backup scripts actually running the database backups.  Load data into databases Extract data from databases I've never actually used DbaTools for it's original purpose, which was migrating databases and instan...

If you want to see a cool ten-minute, "lightning" demo of how you can use PowerShell and Excel together to analyze data or produce nice reports, watch this YouTube video , from 7:47 to 18:22. This is presented by Doug Finke, the author of the Import-Excel PowerShell module.

The highlights for this week have been a few videos from the free-to-view PASS Summit 2016 archive, available at PASS.org . Managing SaaS Application Databases with Elastic Jobs: SQL Agent and More for Azure SQL Database, presented by Deborah Dove Essentially, "Elastic Jobs" is SQL Agent for Azure SQL. She also talks about "Elastic Query", which allows you to run queries on all of your databases, or a specific subset of them. Azure Data Services: Spotlight on Azure SQL Database, presented by Debora Dove I think that this is a good introduction to Azure SQL and it covers Elastic Pools. I'm sure that I learned a few things. One thing that bothers ms is the low query/minute ceilings for the various offerings. Design Patterns for SaaS Applications with Azure SQL Database, presented by Bill Gibson If you are going multi-tenant, sharding and employing Elastic Pools seems to be the only sane choice. "Most of our customers are compute-bound, n...