SSIS Toolbox in SSDT for Visual Studio 2015

I am currently writing my latest book - Expert Scripting and Automation for DBAs, which Apress will be publishing later this year. The book is based around SQL Server 2016 and I am currently writing a chapter that is based around SSIS.

I needed to use SSDT for Visual Studio 2015, so that I could use the pre-release version of the Azure Feature Pack, for SSIS 2016. When creating a project, however, I was rather disturbed to find that I had no controls in my Toolbox!

Apparently, there are two Toolbox windows, and SSDT defaults to the wrong one. You should navigate to View | Other Windows and open the SSIS Toolbox window. Normality will at once be restored.


Find my book, Pro SQL Server Administration on Amazon -

America

United Kingdom

Pro SQL Server Administration

I am very excited that my first book has now been published by Apress. Pro SQL Server Administration is available in paperback and e-book formats, pretty much everywhere, including Apress, Amazon and Waterstones


Find my book, Pro SQL Server Administration on Amazon -

America

United Kingdom

Finding Object Dependencies In SQL Server

In a sprawling database application, it can sometime be a nightmare if you need to alter the definition of a table, for fear that you will break an object that references it, that you were unaware of. (Although this will all be detailed in your documentation of course! ;-) )

But recently I found a great DMF, which is documented on MSDN, but I had never come across, that given the name of a table, will list all of the Procedures, Functions, Views and Triggers that reference it, and you can join it back to other system object, such as sys.sql_modules to pull back other useful information, such as is the object schema_bound (which will potentially stop you altering the table, and throw an error when you run the ALTER script.)

The DMF is called sys. dm_sql_referencing_entities and the example below will list the details of all objects that depend on a table called mySchema.myTable, along with if the object is schema bound, and even the object’s definition (providing it is not encrypted).

SELECT referencing_schema_name, referencing_entity_name, is_schema_bound, [definition]

FROM sys.dm_sql_referencing_entities ('mySchema.myTable', 'OBJECT') r

INNER JOIN sys.sql_modules m

                ON r.referencing_id = m.object_id

Find my book, Pro SQL Server Administration on Amazon -

America

United Kingdom

SSIS - Execute Process Task Hangs When Run From Server Agent

I was faced with an interesting problem recently. I had a SSIS Package that was stored in the Package Store on an ETL Server, and run from a Server Agent job on a Clustered SQL Instance.

If the package was run in Debug mode, it worked perfectly. If it was run from Windows Scheduled Tasks on the Cluster, it also ran perfectly, but when run from Server Agent on the Cluster, it failed.

Or to be more accurate, it didn’t fail! In fact it didn’t do anything! It reached an execute process task that was calling a decompression utility, and sat there, not working, not failing, not doing anything!

Well, I tried the usual things, such as:

Adding SSIS Server to Local Intranet Zone

Turning on Allow Unsafe Files

Using "God Account" to run job

Using "God Account" to Run As on the execute process

Making the owner of the .exe the same account as the execution context of the process

Disable attachment manager

I knew the package and executable worked, so I was sure that it was a OS level setting, but what? Well, I struggled with this, with the aid of an infrastructure team and also MS Technical Support, but the answer finally came from the MSDN Forums, who suggested creating an Environment Variable called SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS and setting the Value to 1.

This worked perfectly, but it was an interesting situation, and wanted to share the resolution with you all.


Find my book, Pro SQL Server Administration on Amazon -

America


United Kingdom

Including Current Date In a Flat File Name - SSIS

There was a thread on MSDN Forums, which paraphrased, asked "How can I include the current Year and Month in a file name when I create a Flat File in SSIS"

Although this is a relatively straight forward task, because SSIS is so visual, it can be difficult to explain how to do things in Forum threads, so I decided to produce this short walk through video. Hope you enjoy, and find it useful...

Find my book, Pro SQL Server Administration on Amazon -

America

United Kingdom

Find a User's Effective Permissions

There was a recent post on the MSDN forums, that paraphrased, asked, how do I find out what permissions a User has to all Objects, at all levels, including those granted by their role memberships, etc.

Now, I am assuming that this is a fairly common security auditing task, so I scanned Google to dig out a script that would do it, but to my amazement, I could not find one, so I decided to write one. It is a pretty simple script, using the fn_my_permissions function and a couple of well known system tables.

In order to run it, you will need to be able to impersonate the login that you are running it for, and of course, you will also need the appropriate permissions to the system tables.

Feel free to modify the script, but please give due credit. This will work with 2005 and 2008, but I actually wrote it in Denali, so it is defiantly forward-compatible. Enjoy...

EXECUTE AS LOGIN = 'INSERT LOGIN NAME'
 SELECT t.name,  a.subentity_name, a.permission_name
 FROM sys.objects t
 CROSS APPLY fn_my_permissions(QUOTENAME(t.name), 'OBJECT') a
 UNION ALL
 SELECT d.name, a.subentity_name, a.permission_name
 FROM sys.databases d
 CROSS APPLY fn_my_permissions(QUOTENAME(d.name), 'DATABASE') a
 UNION ALL
 SELECT @@SERVERNAME, a.subentity_name, a.permission_name
 FROM fn_my_permissions(NULL, 'SERVER') a
 ORDER BY t.name
 REVERT


Find my book, Pro SQL Server Administration on Amazon -

America


United Kingdom

Head In The Clouds

In Paul Randal's recent SQLSkills Insider e-mail, he talked briefly about the SQL Azure, and how he had not seen his Clients express a large appetite for it "yet", and that inspired me to write this post, (which I have been meaning to write for a couple of weeks), to share my thoughts on Azure.

So firstly, I just want to state my position on Cloud Computing in general, and that for the most part is very positive. The opportunity to access your applications from any part of the world, with consistent performance and a massively reduced Total Cost Of Ownership has to be exciting, and there are many applications, such as Office and even Exchange, that I feel are a perfect fit for the Cloud.

SQL on the other hand is a different matter. Does it really fit in the Cloud, and if it does, what place does it hold? Will it ever be able to host Enterprise class systems, or will in fall into the category of Virtulization, which is great in the most part, but does not fit well for SQL, especially for Enterprise Solutions?

Well, because of these concerns, and because of the current immaturity of Azure, until recently, I have shyed away from playing around with this app, and kept my focus on traditional SQL, until...

I recently spent several months working on a project to plan the up-scaling of an established 2TB local system to global 32TB Enterprise class system. The obvious choice for this system was a FastTrack Data warehouse Appliance, and I had a fantastic opportunity to do some POC work at Microsoft HQ, (Which I will blog about soon). The POC was successful, and I thought it was a done-deal, but then an instruction came from a very senior level, that we should be investigating putting the application in the Cloud.

Now my gut reaction here was wow! An opportunity to build an Enterprise class database in the Cloud, but within seconds (and luckily before speaking) my professional head suppressed my geek head and I articulated the answer that it would not be practical because of the 50GB limit in Azure. This led to the suggestion that we could shard the data across multiple instances, which is true, but seemed like trying to plug a square hole with a round peg. I knew at that point that the idea was unlikely to go further, and we would probably stay with FastTrack Solution, but I felt it prudent to subscribe to Azure and have a play with it.

So when playing with Azure, the thing that surprised me was how limited the product currently is. A lot of the limitations surround Administration, and make perfect sense, for example, when your database is in the Cloud, why would you need to worry about High Availability? There is already a 4 9s SLA with MS, just by signing up. Some of the other limitations, however, are just a bit strange. For example, you can not create Heap Tables, only Tables with Clustered Indexes. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of having a CI on all tables, but it just felt like a strange limitation. I also found that quite a few useful tools, such as Service Broker are not supported, and even my favourite %%PhysLoc%% query would not compile!

According to a contact of mine, there are currently only about 20 people in the Azure product team, and as I already mentioned, the offering is still fairly immature, so I fully expect that a lot of functionality will appear over the next few months and years, so from a technical perspective, I don't feel that we are quite ready to put many systems in the Cloud "yet", but we may be soon. I also suspect that the size restrictions will be relaxed as bandwidth improves.

My main question mark around Azure (thinking Medium-Term) is more political. If you are storing client data, especially if it is from a sensitive sector, such as public service data, I can not imagine those Clients, when asking the regular question "Where exactly are you storing my data", liking the answer "Oh, it's in the Cloud..."

Now I know that this stance is silly because I would be willing to bet large amounts of money that data is much more secure in Microsoft's Cloud, than it is in the vast majority of Data Centres, but what I'm not sure, is how long it will take, or how to even bring-about that cultural change that would be required, especially as the people who will need to be convinced are likely to be non-technical.

My other question mark, is a rather self-centred one, and revolves around (if I'm honest with myself), humans not liking change, because from a corporate point of view, it is actually a positive...

According to my contact, Microsoft's medium-term SQL Server policy will be to release features first to the Cloud, because they can easily be rolled back if problematic. (This is a concern in itself for the Cloud because it will always be the most up-to-date but possibly also the most unstable platform), then to release to Appliances. (FastTrack is already on v3, PDW is out and OLTP and BI appliances are on the way), and then finally to release to the traditional market.

Now this leads me to assume, that within the medium-term, large SQL projects will either be hosted in the Cloud, or on Appliances, and both of these environments are largely pre-configured and pre-optimized, so where does that leave skilled SQL professionals, who make a living out of performing those complex optimizations that will no longer be required?

Again, this is probably a silly stance, because there are bound to be a whole different set of issues that will require highly skilled professionals. For example, just because Windows 7 is a damn site easier to work with and configure than DOS 6.1, does not mean that there is no market for Desktop Support Technicians, or Network Engineers, but it does mean that more people are able to support it, which means that the market rates are dramatically lower than they were 15 years ago.

Maybe I'm an eternal pessimist, but it is certainly food for thought? If you have any thoughts on the subject, please feel free to leave comments...


Find my book, Pro SQL Server Administration on Amazon -

America

United Kingdom