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SteveStedman

Azure PDW What is Active

Lately I have had the opportunity to work with performance tuning of queries running on the Azure Parallel Data Warehouse (Azure PDW). This has been interesting in that everything you thought you knew about SQL Server DMV’s, writing queries and overall performance tuning is just a little bit different.

My goal was to write a query to show me what is currently active and running on the Azure PDW database.

To start with, I discovered the view called SYS.DM_PDW_EXEC_REQUESTS which contains all kinds of great information to get us started. Specifically it hold information on queries that are currently running or have recently been run or attempted to be run on the Azure PDW database.

SELECT *
FROM SYS.DM_PDW_EXEC_REQUESTS;

Which returned hundreds of rows, and didn’t really get me to where I wanted to go.
Next I added a WHERE statement to filter out those queries that were “done”. In this case done means that were ‘Completed’, ‘Failed’ or ‘Cancelled’.

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The On Call DBA For Corruption

 

One of those services that I offer is on call help for DBA’s who encounter database corruption. Call me anytime 24/7 and as long as you are an existing customer, or we can work out a billing arrangement to turn you into a paying customer, I can help.

That’s all a good if you are familiar with what database corruption is. But based on the occasional phone call that I receive based on my outreach to help with database corruption, it makes me think that I haven’t done the best job describing what corruption is.

A few minutes ago at 12:15am, my phone rings, I was sound asleep but it woke me up and I answered it. Still a bit groggy I hear a voice on the other end asking “Are you the one who can help with database corruption removal?” to which I answer yes. He then goes into a story about how he has just been fingerprinted and he wasn’t supposed to be arrested. He goes on to describe how he didn’t feel that he should have been arrested, but the police officers have told him that now that his fingerprints are in the database, there isn’t anything they can do to undo it. I break in with “sorry that’s not the type of work I do”, and he continues to request my help to to get his fingerprints out of the database and remove his arrest record. I end the call, and hope that this wasn’t his one phone call that he is allowed when he was being booked.

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Database Health Monitor – January 2017 Version Released

Today we released the Database Health Monitor January 2017 version. You can download it for free at http://DatabaseHealth.com/Download.

This update includes  some new branding with new logos, new icons, and a new splash screen, as well as the usual feature enhancements and bug fixes.

So far since we started tracking downloads there have been 11,100 downloads of Database Health Monitor worldwide.

As part of our goal of improving Database Health Monitor, and expanding it to meet the needs of more and more DBA’s, we have created a survey to solicit input on how people are using it, and what we can do better to improve the product.  The survey is located here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TJLJDXH

Here is the list of changes in the latest release.

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