Ed Elliott's Agile SQL Club

I don’t have time for this “I am a DBA, I am busy, too busy.

In my blog post here https://the.agilesql.club/2019/06/what-steps-are-there-to-move-to-safe-automated-database-deployments/ I described the steps you need to go through so you can build up your confidence that you are capable of deploying databases using…

Database deployments are scary, you have all this data and if you drop the wrong table, run the wrong delete statement or have an error in a stored procedure that forgets to write that critical piece of data then you may never truly recover from that.

Database Engineering: Database Modelling: Do I need to have an incrementing identity int/bigint as my clustered index in a SQL Server database?

If you have a PIVOT query and it isn’t returning the data you expect, what can you do to troubleshoot it?

How to delete data efficiently When we delete data from a table in SQL Server, we can often find that the delete is slower than even the original insert, especially if the insert was made using the bulk insert API.

How do you know whether a database code change is going to be great, okay or awful?

Reading Time: 5 minutes (just do it!)

Reading Time: 15 minutes (it is quite hard going, but you need to know this if you need to work with the DacFx) DacFx - Getting the data type of a column on a table, a rehash of an old blog post This post has been years in the making, I did a version of it

Reading Time: 4 minutes (not a minute longer) TLDR; You probably don’t want to actually merge dacpac’s you probably want to deploy multiple and use /p:IncludeCompositeObjects=true.

Over the last couple of years I have been using VSCode more and more and Visual Studio less and less, this is great but there isn’t first class support for SSDT in VSCode, it would be great if there was but there isn’t today.

Sometimes you don’t have the perfect development environment for SQL Server, sometimes you deploy to things like SQL Azure and want to test locally, for various reasons it is possible that you want to deploy to one version of SQL Server but set the project

Reading Time 1 Minute I have been getting kubernetes setup on my laptop via minikube and I followed all the examples to the T, especially the part about creating a new external network and referencing that when you create the minikube (go search for a tut…

I have been asked a few times now for course completion certificates so I have decided to give out certificates to anyone who pays for a plan and sends me a screen shot of a unit test they have written and answer a question on unit testing.

TLDR: There is a new exciting community slack channel where you can find a mentor, a mentee or both if that floats your boat.

Reading Time: 6 minutes (not a minute longer) TLDR; ARM templates are a great way to deploy to Azure, setting up a template that can deploy an entire environment from databases to web servers and load balancers to firewalls (damn you azure, ok, I’ll call…

I had a requirement to run MySQL on a VSTS hosted build agent and then to be able to run commands from outside of the container and this gave me the chance to have a play around with VSTS support for containers and builds as YAML (YAML builds / builds as…

Unit testing using tSQLt is really great, you call FakeTable on any tables your code touches and then insert the columns and rows your test actually need, nothing more, nothing less but what happens when you have more complicated processes like an ETL pro…

I had a template that deployed a premium managed disk and a virtual machine.

I have been using Octopus to deploy ARM templates for a while now and the default task that comes with Octopus to deploy doesn’t have any debugging information enabled and when you run this powershell: New-AzureRMResourceGroupDeployment If you don’t have…

I have been starting to write more and more typescript lately and quite enjoying it.

In the first part of this series, we looked at where to find out more information about GDPR in the UK (hint: The ICO.gov website has everything you need).

In the last half of 2017, I decided to run a tSQLt course and went down the route of putting together a free 12-week email course.

Re-Imagining the SSIS development environment. oooh: ahhh: SSIS is a powerful and versatile tool for extracting, transforming and loading data into or out of SQL Server.

In part three of this short series Part one is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-1 Part two is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-2 This is part three: https://the.agilesql.club/blog…

Welcome GDPR friends :) Part one is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-1 This is part two: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliott/2018-02-01/GDPR-Panic-Part-2 Part three is: https://the.agilesql.club/blogs/Ed-Elliot…

GDPR is coming (or if you are reading this in a few weeks then gdpr is here, what do you need to know and where do you start?

I have been working with azure arm functions for quite a while and they are exceptionally useful but also quite a pain to work with, visualizing what it is that the functions will resolve to is often hard.

I have had a problem with DSC in Azure Automation for a few months now, there was a change made to the xSqlServer DSC resource which meant that the paths internally were too long to be compiled on Azure Automation, I don’t even really want to think why be…

There are a few different choices for tools to use when it comes to SQL Server, while the “experienced” amongst us have used query analyzer, enterprise manager and probably ssms it isn’t always clear what tool you should use.

Writing infrastructure as code is pretty nice and I enjoy the declarative approach of defining what you want and letting the tooling take care of the how.

ARMED, where is the source?

I think the title sums it up, I have published a new version of ARMED the arm helper extension for VSCode.

I have been working with ARM templates for a little while and have found it really annoying to test functions inside the templates, you see if you have an ARM template it is a JSON document made up of lots of key/values like: {"name": "a_name"} but it is…

UPDATE: I haven’t been keeping it up to date so deprecated it - if you find something like this useful moan at microsoft and get them to implement it!

I was setting up an availability group listener recently and when I tried to connect to the listener I got an error message to say “The host cannot be found” after the usual 15 seconds connection delay.

I have been playing around with including all my build dependencies in docker for windows lately and had a build that kept giving me this error in the build log: “the input device is not a TTY.

Hey, VSTS YAML builds are my new favorite thing, by like a million miles.

This post is for a specific type of person if you are: New to source control Are getting started on your path to the continuous delivery nirvana Have been able to get your database into some sort of source control system Have more than one person checking…

Every AzureRM command I was running I would get an error message telling me to login, I then did a login, checked that I had the right subscription and I was still getting the error message - after logging in 7 times I figured that maybe there was somethi…

It seems like more and more recently I have been writing powershell and typescript rather than c# and t-sql and there are quite a few things to like about the tools for both of these (typescript and powershell).

TLDR: If you build an SSDT project you can get an error which says: “SQL71502: Function: [XXX].

I worked one particular contract where I was forced to take my lunch at 11:35 every day, and it was all virtualisations fault!

The question of where to install tSQLt is probably the most common question I get when I talk about unit testing T-SQL, so much so that I thought that it would be a good topic for a blog.

So Visual Studio 2017 has been released a while and I had created a version of the test adapter (which lets you run tSQLt tests from within Visual Studio with SSDT, ReadyRoll or just plan sql scripts using the test window but I held off on pushing it to t…

A free email course on how to use tSQLt including the technical aspects of writing unit tests AND the art of writing repeatable, using unit tests for even the most complicated T-SQL code UPDATE: I thought that if I got a certain number by October 1st I wo…

I saw on slack recently a question about how the ssis file enumeraror orders (or more specifically doesn’t order) files.

What is the SSDT Dev Pack It is basically a collection of tools that I find make developing in for SQL Server in SSDT better or easier.

SQL Cover is a tool to measure code coverage in T-SQL.

K-SSIS-ed - View any property or script in SSIS with a single click A cross platform re-imagined IDE and SSIS package viewer with one goal to allow a developer to get to any property, including a c# or vb.net script within a single click and one second.