Category: Database Tools (page 1 of 2)

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April 8, 2025 / 0 Comments

An Introduction to Bicep

I am starting a multi-week series of posts covering the topic of Bicep, Microsoft’s Infrastructure as Code scripting language, since I have been working with this tool heavily for the past several months. You may wonder why a database developer is using Infrastructure as Code, since DevOps engineers typically do that. However, I decided to learn Bicep as a proof of concept for my team since we repeatedly find ourselves creating the same types of resources for our projects. We would like to reduce the amount of time and effort we put into creating our infrastructure so we can spend more time developing databases and pipelines to get our users the things they care about.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more details on how I have started integrating Bicep templates into my database development lifecycle.

What’s in this post

What is Bicep?

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Bicep is a declarative scripting language created by Microsoft as a successor to and addition on top of their existing Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. (Yes, the new templating script language is called Bicep because the original was called ARM.) Bicep is a scripting language that allows you to easily and quickly write declarative scripts to define how you want Azure resources to be created. These scripts, called templates, are used for Infrastructure as Code, which means you are generating your infrastructure of cloud objects using code instead of provisioning them manually through a portal. The main competitor for Azure Bicep is Terraform, which is a multi-platform tool that essentially does the same thing. But Bicep is developed by Microsoft to work only with the Azure cloud, so it is better suited for deploying Azure resources than Terraform is.

After you have created your Bicep script defining the resources you want to deploy to your Azure cloud environment, you deploy that template either manually or through a pipeline, and Azure gets to work creating the specified resources. In the background, as the deployment begins, the first thing Azure Resource Manager does is convert the Bicep script into the traditional JSON script used by ARM templates, so that it can understand and process your requests, since Bicep is essentially a nicer skin built for ARM. Once the template has been converted to JSON, Azure Resource Manager starts parsing all resource requests and sending those to the correct ARM APIs to create those resources.

If your template is set up correctly, all your requested resources will deploy to your cloud environment, and the time it takes to deploy depends on the resources you are creating.

Use cases for Bicep

Bicep templates are great for any Azure cloud users who find themselves creating the same types of resources over and over again, or for anyone who wants to make their environment re-deployable. For example, if you need to recreate your development environment from production after each deployment cycle, you could write Bicep templates to do that work for you. Essentially, if you are doing resource deployment on a regular interval and you would like to stop doing all that work manually, to reduce human error or to make the process more efficient, Bicep may be the tool for you.

What I use Bicep for

I started using Bicep as a proof of concept for my team to determine if it would be suitable for our needs for creating Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Windows servers which we install SQL Server on. As of the time I am writing this, I still haven’t figured out 100% how to generate those servers exactly as we need them through Bicep, but I’ve gotten a good way through writing a template to provision what we need. I have proven that Bicep will work for that, but there are some final technical needs, such as using a custom virtual machine (VM) image with SQL Server already installed with our required settings, which I haven’t quite figured out yet.

Another use case that I have completed a proof of concept for is to generate all required minimum resources for our Azure-based AI chatbots with one template, which has already been immensely useful for me and my team. Creating fully cloud-based resources with Bicep has proven to be much easier to accomplish than creating the IaaS servers I started with, because all specifications and settings for those resources are managed by Azure, so Bicep handles them easily. It took me only a single afternoon to write my AI chatbot backend Bicep template, whereas it took me over a week to get my IaaS Bicep template partially working.

This new AI backend template creates an Azure SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, firewall rules, key vault, key vault role assignment, storage account, auditing on the SQL Server, and a Search Service for managing the document indexes used by the bots we’re developing for our business users. When I was doing this all manually, it would take me about an hour to work through the portal and deploy each of these resources. But now that I’ve turned it all into a Bicep template, it takes only a few minutes to deploy it all.

My thoughts on Bicep

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Overall, I think Bicep is a cool and useful tool to use to create your Azure resources using a single script, which can be deployed over and over again. It really speeds up the creation of resources and reduces the chance of manual error while clicking through the portal setup of the same objects. There are several flaws with how it operates, such as not always understanding the hierarchy and order of deployment required for related resources, like it claims to do easily, but that isn’t an insurmountable challenge.

As with most scripting or programming languages, I wish there was more and better documentation from Microsoft to help us newbies figure things out faster, but it’s not impossible to learn. I would recommend that anyone who is tired of manually deploying the same or similar Azure resources repeatedly look into using Bicep to speed up their infrastructure work.

Best resources for learning Bicep

I learned most of what I know about Bicep from a Microsoft Learn workshop that is free online. The first learning path I worked through was the Fundamentals of Bicep, which I would recommend for any developer who is new to Bicep. After I completed that one to get a general understanding of writing Bicep, I then completed a few separate modules from the intermediate and advanced Bicep learning paths. Then there were many things I just had to learn on my own through other resources outside of Microsoft or through my own trial and error.

Summary

Bicep is a great tool that all types of developers working in the Azure cloud can likely use to speed up their development lifecycles. If you’re interested in learning more about Bicep, stay tuned for the next few weeks as I take a deeper dive into how Bicep works using detailed real-world examples.

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March 18, 2025 / 0 Comments

Deploying A DACPAC to Azure SQL Server

One of the easiest ways to duplicate SQL Server database objects from one database to another–such as in a situation where you want to copy the structure of a production database down to a development database to help with testing and development–is to create a file called a DACPAC from the database you want to copy. With SQL Server, there are two ways to copy a database without creating and restoring a full database backup: 1) Create a full copy of the database structure and data by exporting to a BACPAC file, or 2) Create a copy of only the database structure by exporting to a DACPAC file.

This post will cover how you can import a previously generated DACPAC file onto an Azure SQL Database to duplicate the structure of another database with little effort on your part. It specifically covers copying an existing Azure SQL Database to another Azure SQL Database. This process may work with on-prem or managed instances of SQL Server, but I haven’t tested that yet.

What’s in this post

Prerequisites

  • Have SSMS available to use
  • Have an existing Azure SQL Database ready to copy
  • Have an Azure SQL Server or Database to load the DACPAC to

Note: The source and target databases can be on the same Azure SQL Server or on different ones.

What are DACPACs and BACPACS?

There have already been many blog posts written on the subject of the difference between DACPACs and BACPACs, so I will refrain from trying to duplicate that information. Essentially, a DACPAC is an export of the schema/structure of a database, including the database users and logins. A BACPAC is similar to the DACPAC except that it contains the data from the database as well. If you would like more detailed information about both of these types of files, I recommend reading this post from SQLShack.

Then if you’re like me and are now wondering what the difference is between a BACPAC file and a full database backup (BAK file), I found this resource on SQL Server Central that explained the difference well.

Why use a DACPAC?

As I mentioned in the introduction above, the primary use case for making and importing a DACPAC file of your database is to quickly copy all database objects–including tables, procedures, functions, and even users–to a new version of the database, such as when trying to create a new dev version of an existing production database. That was my exact use case and what triggered me to write this post. I got tired of manually copying tables, procedures, and functions from one database to another whenever we needed a new version of a database.

How to Create a DACPAC File

When you have a source database that you would like to copy over to a new database, without the data, you should create a DACPAC from SQL Server using a “Task” on the database. To do this, right-click on the database name in the Object Explorer, select “Tasks” then select “Extract Data-Tier Application”. This will open a wizard for you to create a DACPAC file of the selected database.

Screenshot of the context menu where you can select to Extract Data-tier Application for a database
Choose to “Extract Data-tier Application” from the context menu of the Database in the Object Explorer

If instead, you click on “Export Data-Tier Application”, you will be brought to a wizard for creating a BACPAC file, which is not what we intend to do during this process, so make sure you choose the option to Extract a data-tier application.

After selecting that option, you will see a screen like the following. Review the introduction page and make sure it refers to creating a DAC package (see screenshot below, underlined in red) and not a BAC package.

Screenshot of the "Extract Data-tier Application" wizard in SSMS
The introduction page of the “Extract Data-tier Application” wizard, confirm that it is going to extract to a DAC package, not a BACPAC.

Step through the wizard, provide a name for the “Application” (database name), and choose where you want the file to be downloaded to on your local machine.

Screenshot of the setup screen of the "Extract Data-Tier Application" wizard in SSMS.
The DACPAC extraction properties page of the “Extract Data-tier Application” wizard

Once you have reviewed the settings for your file, click “Next” until the creation process starts. Once that has been completed, you will have successfully created a DACPAC file which is stored in the location that you chose.

Using a DACPAC to Format an Azure SQL Database

There are two different ways that you can deploy a DACPAC to an Azure SQL Server. The first way is to deploy the DACPAC to create a database, the second is to update an existing database with the DACPAC.

Overview of the Steps

  • Choose whether you want to create a new database with the DACPAC or update/format an existing database
  • If choosing to create a new database:
    • Right-click on the “Databases” folder in the Object Explorer of SSMS, choose “Deploy Data-tier Application”
    • Specify the DACPAC you want to use and the name of the database you want to create
    • Run the wizard which will create a database with default settings
  • If choosing to use an existing database, whether blank or already in use:
    • Right-click on the database, select “Tasks” then “Upgrade Data-tier application”
    • Specify the DACPAC file you want to use
    • Review the changes the wizard identifies between the DACPAC and the target database
    • Run the wizard which will update the target database with all changes necessary from the DACPAC

Deploying a New Azure SQL Database using a DACPAC

If you want to make your new Azure SQL Database on an existing Azure SQL Server and don’t want to do that through the portal, you can create a new database on the server by “deploying” a DACPAC to create a new database.

The main downside to this method of using a DACPAC is that the database will be created with the default setup, which for me is a General Purpose standard database with 2 vCores. That level of database may be pricy for some people, or it could be underperforming for others, depending on your needs. Due to that downside, that is not the method I chose to use my DACPAC with, but I still researched it so I could understand both ways. If you want to know how I used a DACPAC, skip down to the section for “upgrading” with a DACPAC below.

Deploying a Data-Tier Application

To create a new database from a DACPAC, you first need to connect to your target server through SSMS in the Object Explorer. Once you have connected, right-click on the “Databases” folder and choose “Deploy Data-Tier Application” from the list.

Screenshot of the context menu where you can choose to "Deploy Data-tier Application" for a server
Choose to “Deploy Data-tier Application” from the context menu of the Databases folder in the Object Explorer of SSMS

This will open a wizard that is very similar to the one for “upgrading” a data-tier application (discussed below). On the overview page of the wizard, you can confirm that you are going to deploy a DACPAC and not a BACPAC.

Screenshot of the introduction screen of the "Deploy Data-Tier Application" wizard in SSMS.
The introduction page of the “Deploy Data-tier Application” wizard

The first thing you will need to do in this wizard is to choose the DACPAC file you previously created.

Screenshot of the "Deploy Data-tier Application" wizard on the page where you choose the DACPAC you want to deploy
The page of the “Deploy Data-tier Application” wizard where you choose the DACPAC file you want to deploy from

Click Next to move to the following page, where you will choose the name of the database you will deploy.

Screenshot of the "Deploy Data-tier Application" wizard on the page where you choose the the name of the new database you want to deploy
The page of the “Deploy Data-tier Application” wizard where you choose the name of the new database you want to deploy from the DACPAC

Click Next to move to the Summary page and review the process that the wizard is about to execute to ensure everything is set the way you want. Click Next again to deploy the DACPAC and create a new database from that file.

Once that process completes, you can close the wizard and then check on your database through the Object Explorer to see that you now have a new database with the same objects as the source database. At this point, you will also be able to see the newly created database in the Azure Portal under that SQL Server, where you can make any changes you would like to the default setup chosen by the deployment.

Updating or Formatting an Existing Azure SQL Database with a DACPAC

This method of “updating” an existing Azure SQL Database is helpful if you already have a database that you want to align with another, or if you have already created a blank database meeting your standards that you want to quickly deploy database objects to. In the previous section, the method of “Deploy a Data-Tier Application” creates a new database from the specified DACPAC, but that database is created with the default Azure SQL Database settings, which is “General Purpose: Standard-series (Gen5), 2 vCores”. That database setup is estimated to cost (in our setup) $373 per month.

If that default setup for a database doesn’t work for you or you don’t want to fix that after the database has been created, you can use this second method of “upgrading” your existing database with the DACPAC. Before you can complete this method, you first need to create a blank database on your Azure SQL Server, through whichever method you prefer. Or use any other existing Azure SQL Database that you are fine with overwriting with the DACPAC.

Upgrading a Data-Tier Application

Connect to your target database in SSMS through the Object Explorer. When you are ready to import the source database objects onto this new database, right-click on the empty database then select “Tasks” then “Upgrade Data-tier Application”.

Screenshot of the context menu in SSMS where you can choose to "Upgrade Data-tier Application"
Choose to “Upgrade Data-tier Application” from the context menu of the existing database you want to deploy the DACPAC to

This will open another wizard that will walk you through the process of “upgrading” your chosen database with the DAC package of another database.

Screenshot of the "Upgrade Data-tier Application" wizard on the introduction page.
The introduction page of the “Upgrade Data-tier Application” wizard

On the second page of the wizard, you will be prompted to select the DAC package you would like to use for the upgrade. Browse to the DACPAC file you created earlier, then click Next.

Screenshot of the "Upgrade Data-tier Application" wizard on the page where you choose the DACPAC you want to deploy.
The page of the “Upgrade Data-tier Application” wizard where you choose the DACPAC file you want to deploy to the database

After you click Next, the system will start detecting changes between the target database and the DACPAC you selected, which may take a few minutes.

Screenshot of the "Upgrade Data-tier Application" wizard on the page where you have the wizard detect changes between the DACPAC and the target database.
The page of the “Upgrade Data-tier Application” wizard where the wizard checks for differences between the DACPAC and the target database

If you have already imported the DACPAC before or have anything on your target database that is different from the source, you will receive a warning like this:

Screenshot of the "Upgrade Data-tier Application" wizard on the page where you must specify that you want to proceed with the upgrade despite possible data loss.
The page of the “Upgrade Data-tier Application” wizard where you confirm that you are okay with proceeding despite the risk of data loss from deploying the DACPAC

I got that warning because I had already imported the DACPAC so I no longer had a blank database. In this situation, you are required to check the box that you’re okay with overwriting the existing structure by continuing. If it’s your first time attempting to import the DACPAC onto a blank database, you should instead receive a green check box on this page.

On the next page, choose whether or not you want to roll back in the event of a failure during the “upgrade”. I chose to not have it roll back since this was going to be a new dev database that I could tweak, fix, or simply recreate if something went wrong. You may want to choose differently.

Screenshot of the "Upgrade Data-tier Application" wizard on the page where you choose rollback options.
The page of the “Upgrade Data-tier Application” wizard where you choose the rollback option you want the wizard to use when deploying the DACPAC

The final step will be for the system and you to review the “upgrade” plan. You will see a list of all changes that will be applied to the database on the “Review Upgrade Plan” page. If you’re happy with the proposed list of changes, click Next until the upgrade process starts and the DACPAC gets applied. Once that process completes, you can close the wizard and then check on your database through the Object Explorer to see that you now have database objects deployed to the database that you didn’t before.

Screenshot of the "Upgrade Data-tier Application" wizard on the page where you review the differences between the DACPAC and the target database that have been identified.
The page of the “Upgrade Data-tier Application” wizard where you review all the changes that will be applied based on the DACPAC

Can’t I just import the DACPAC from the Azure Portal?

This was the first thing I tried when trying to import my DACPAC into an Azure SQL Server. I uploaded my DACPAC file to a storage account, then clicked “Import” on the SQL Server page in the Portal. This started a new deployment where the SQL Database was created but then the deployment of the DACPAC to the database failed so I was left with an empty database on my server. The error I received when the deployment failed was related to not specifying a BACPAC file for the import process, so it expects that file type instead of a DACPAC.

If you can figure out how to import a new database to a SQL Server using the Portal, I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

Summary

If you, like me, were confused about how you could import a DACPAC file into a database on an Azure SQL Server (because the Microsoft documentation for this isn’t great), I hope these instructions help you with your import. It is as simple as creating the DACPAC file and then using a wizard to “upgrade” or “deploy” your database using the DACPAC.

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March 4, 2025 / 0 Comments

Moving Data Between Azure SQL Databases–the Fast Way

I have done more database creation in the past couple weeks than I had done in the previous year combined, all because my team is working on making several different AI chat bots for our business users and we are being very agile about our development process. At first we had separate Azure SQL Databases for each chat bot to use for its backend, but then I decided it would be more prudent, cost effective, and easier to manage if we combined the three related bots into a single database. This meant that I needed to move data from three disparate databases into one single database, and I wanted to do it easily without any extra tools.

How I decided to move the data between the databases was to quickly export to a flat file then import that flat file onto the new database–since I only had a few hundred rows to move from each source database. As far as I am aware, this should work with all modern types of SQL Server (on-prem, IaaS, Azure SQL Database). Read on to learn how to follow the same process I did.

What’s in this post

Exporting the data from the source

On your source database in SSMS, run a SELECT query to retrieve all the data you want to copy over to your target database. Once you have your result set, select all records, right-click on them, then choose “Save Results As…” from the menu.

Screenshot showing the "Save Results As" option when right-clicking on the results of a query in SSMS
You can export your query results using “Save Results As…” from the right-click dialog

That will open the normal “Save As” dialog, and you can choose where to save your results. Save the file to your computer.

Once the file has been saved, I recommend opening the CSV using Notepad++ or similar tool to review the formatting of the data. There were a few times when I went through this process that the columns names did not get exported to the flat file, and instead the columns were generically named “Column1”, “Column2”, and so on (see final screenshot below for what this would look like when trying to import). Chances are that you won’t run into this issue, but it doesn’t hurt to check. If for some reason your file doesn’t have the correct column names that you expect, simply export the query results to a file again and it should fix the issue.

Importing the data to the target

To import the data onto your target database, connect to it in SSMS as well, right-click on the database name in the Object Explorer, then choose “Tasks” > “Import Flat File”. This will open a wizard to help you import the data.

Screenshot showing where to navigate to in the database menu to import a flat file
Import a flat file using the Task “Import Flat File”, which will open a wizard tool for you

In the dialog that opens, browse to the file that you previously exported from the other database. Once you select that file, a table name is generated that the data will be imported to. You can change the name of that table if you wish. Also, choose the schema that table will go into. This process creates a new table from the imported data, so make sure you don’t use an existing table name.

Screenshot of the Import Flat File wizard where you specify the file you want to import and the table you want to load the data to
Specify the CSV file you created during the export process and the name of the new table you want to load the data into

Click “Next” to move to the next page, where you can preview the data that will be imported. If the data looks good to you, click “Next” to move to the “Modify Columns” page where you can change some settings on the table columns if you would like. I chose to “Allow Nulls” for all columns, just to make things easier for myself in this import process. I plan on deleting this table after I copy the data from it into the final target table, so it doesn’t matter to me if every column allows nulls.

Screenshot of the Import Flat File wizard showing the screen where you can modify the columns of the new table you are going to create during import
This screenshot shows you what can happen if the export process goes a little wonky–the column names from the source may not be put into the CSV file and thus only show as generic names in the Import wizard. From this menu, though, you can modify the properties of the columns in the new table that is going to be created for the import.

Keep clicking “Next” to move through the rest of the pages, review the process before you opt to import, then import the data. Once the import wizard has completed its work, you will now have a new table in your database, essentially a staging table.

To get the data from your staging table into the final target table in your database, you can use an INSERT INTO tablename SELECT... query. This step also allows you to modify the data before moving it into the target table if you need to. In my case, I needed to add an extra column to the data that the source table didn’t have but the target requires, so I hard-coded the value for that column into my SELECT statement so it would be added to the final table.

Cleanup

After you have moved your data into its final destination, make sure to clean up the temporary new table that you created during the import wizard process, to keep things as neat as possible in your database.

Summary

Using this method to copy data between two Azure SQL Databases may be considered a bit lazy, but I truly think it’s the most efficient way to get data from point A to point B. Sure, I could have made a pipeline or used some other system to move the data around, but I only had a few hundred records to copy over so this method worked great for me. Let me know if this method saved you time as well!

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September 27, 2024 / 0 Comments

A Week in the Life- 9/23 – 9/27

Have you ever wondered what the normal work tasks of a database developer/integration engineer looks like? If you have, then this is the post for you. This is a new series of posts where I simply give an overview of what I accomplished each week, giving insight into what life as a database developer looks like for those who might be curious. I also want to do these reviews for my own records and edification, because it’s always good to keep track of the things you accomplish at your job. This post is going to review the week of September 23 – September 27, 2024.

What’s in this post

Meeting with a Software Vendor

One part of my job is interacting with various software vendors that we buy products from. I’m currently on a longer-term project where we are doing a piece-by-piece upgrades to one application that our legal department uses, so this week I met with the vendor’s development team to get an overview of the next step of this upgrade process.

One of the joys of working with vendors is sometimes you go into these meetings thinking the purpose is completely different than what it ends up being, then you have to rethink everything you planned for the meeting on the fly. That was how this meeting went. I wasn’t expecting that I would be the one taking lead on driving the topic by asking questions we needed answers to on our side before we could move forward with the next step of the upgrade. I thought the meeting was going to be the vendor giving an overview of the product for my own learning, not me driving the conversation. As someone newer to the company, this change was a little scary, but I handled it well and got good information for our team from the vendor.

Updating Security Certificates

This part of technology is something I’m still not very familiar with but had to dive into this week. My team had an ETL that broke because it could no longer communicate with our customer’s software due to an outdated security certificate. To fix this broken ETL, I had to locate the correct updated certificate and put that on our ETL server and remove the old one. After making such a small change, things were back to working as they normally do. This problem was a good learning opportunity and not nearly as difficult as I was expecting it would be.

Emergency Database Refresh

I got to experience my first emergency refresh request in our Oracle database environment this week because something went wrong with one of our production databases and the app development team wanted to refresh the database into the lowers as quickly as possible to start troubleshooting. I think fate decided we should have a good day, because our Oracle cloning process into our test environments went off without any issues and finished in about an hour, which is almost a record low. We’ve ran into numerous issues in recent months with the pluggable database cloning process in Oracle, so we are very thankful that one of those problems didn’t arise when we needed this emergency refresh.

Completing Database Permissions Requests

Another piece of Oracle work I got to experience for the first time this week was updating user permissions. We received a request from one of our application developers that they needed a service account to be granted the same level of permissions that his own account had (in test) so that he could complete a task. Although the SQL needed to complete a permissions change in Oracle looks a little different from what I’m used to in SQL Server, it overall was very similar to making permissions changes with T-SQL so was easy to complete.

Attending A Women’s Leadership Conference

My favorite part of this week was getting to spend Tuesday and Wednesday at the Women & Leadership Conference by the Andrus Center at Boise State. This was my first time attending this conference, and I was able to go with the handful of other women in the IT department.

As would be expected for this type of conference, the sessions focused on building soft skills in women instead of hard technical skills like previous work conferences I’ve attended. I listened to a range of women speakers, all of whom are in various leadership roles in different fields and states across the country. I wouldn’t say I loved every session I attended, but most of them were interesting and I learned a lot of tips for managing in the work environment as a woman that I hadn’t thought of before. In the near future, I will be writing a recap with more of my learnings from the conference, if you’re interested in hearing more.

Troubleshooting a Virtual Machine (VM)/SQL Server Connection Issue

This issue was not something I had ever considered before, because I’ve never had to think about the networking setup for VMs that I’ve worked with. Normally, someone else sets up the VM and makes sure it has all the networking and firewall rules needed before we get access to the VM. However, one of my project teammates and I found out that it’s not always the case.

I am working on a different application upgrade project from the one I mentioned above, and I was in charge of setting up those SQL Servers last week. This week, the main application developer started his portion of setting up the VMs we put the SQL Servers on, and he found that he was unable to access the SQL Server from his local computer version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). When he messaged me about this connection issue, I had no idea where to start troubleshooting it since I had never had to think about how SSMS connects to the SQL Server on the VM before.

I had to work with our networking team to figure out the issue, which ended up being that the local firewall on the VM was not setup to allow ingress from the two ports that SSMS/SQL Server requires for connections. The networking team wrote two commands to allow that ingress, ran the commands on all 3 servers we setup last week, and then we were able to easily connect to the new SQL Server instances from our local SSMS apps instead of having to login to the VMs directly.

Finishing and Presenting a Python Data Analysis Script

One of the things I was most pleased and excited about this week was finally getting to demo a complicated Python script I wrote to optimize customer orders based on their previous order history, given a list of input parameters from the customer. I have spent months working on this script, going back and forth with the business users about what should be included, adding new features when requested, and even totally reworking the algorithm when their requests got more advanced. My demo of the script had an audience of the business users as well as members of my own team, including my manager.

The demo itself went really well, the script worked exactly as I wanted it to, running in under 5 seconds to optimize the customer data and provide a recommendation for what should be stocked to fulfill those orders, which is a massive improvement from the current process that takes a week to calculate the best possible solutions. What did not go as I expected was hearing from the business users that they are unsure if the solution provided is accurate enough, so they’re afraid to move forward with my script unless I did several things that would likely lead to several more months of rework. At the end of the meeting, we had decided as a team that instead of implementing this solution I worked hard on for months, that isntead we would put their current process onto a newer and beefier server in hopes that it would run faster than the current week.

No developer wants to spend months working on something just to be told that it won’t be used due to reasons that are out of the developer’s control, but that seems to be the situation I am in now. I am staying positive about it though, because it was a great Python development learning opportunity for me when I came into the company, and I have faith that with time, the business users will come around to using the faster and more modern solution when they see that the results I produced are very close to what they already get with the current solution. I might need to do a little more tweaking to get my algorithm’s results into an acceptable range compared to the current process, but I am hoping it won’t require a full rework to do so.

Summary

Sometimes I have weeks at work where I feel like I haven’t accomplished all that much. This week was one of those. But now that I have typed out everything I did like this, I am seeing that I do a LOT of work while I’m at work, and I am proud of everything I learned and accomplished this week, even if every single work item did not go as planned.

Being a database developer or data integration engineer comes with a lot of variation in work, which you can probably see by looking at this week’s and last week’s summaries. There is always something new to learn and work on, so I’m excited I’ve had another interesting week of work and I look forward to next week being interesting as well. (Although I’m technically on vacation next week, so really I mean the following week.)

Do you have any questions about what a database developer does day-to-day that I haven’t answered yet? Let me know in the comments below!

Screenshot of the SQL Server installer dialog with the option to create a new instance or update an existing one highlighted with a red box.
September 24, 2024 / 0 Comments

SQL Server 2022 – Getting the Installer Link to Work

I recently went through a whole day long ordeal trying to figure out how to get the ISO/installer for SQL Server 2022 so I could install it on a few VMs I made for a software upgrade, which I wrote about in a post last week. After spending way too much time just getting the installer downloaded, I then ran into another issue where when I clicked on the link to do a new installation of SQL Server 2022, the link did absolutely nothing. The solution for this problem ended up being simple, but it had me scratching my head and bothering my teammates to try running the installer as well before I figured out what needed to be done.

What’s in this post

The Problem

When you run the setup.exe or installer for SQL Server 2022, and select the option for “New SQL Server standalone installation or add features to an existing installation”, the software may do nothing when you click that link. It may have a spinning cursor for a small moment, but then nothing happens at all, no matter how long you wait.

The Solution

I found the answer to this issue on StackExchange. When I first downloaded and ran the installer, the standard Windows dialog came up asking if I wanted to trust the publisher of the program, since it was Unknown. I clicked yes. But despite that apparently, my computer had the file set to blocked, so when I clicked the link to start a new installation, the installer was blocked and nothing ran. To fix this problem, do the following.

Go to wherever you have the ISO file saved, for me this was the Downloads folder. Right-click on the file and select Properties. Then on that General/main page of that dialog, at the bottom there will be a checkbox that says “Unblock” with a message about security if you unblock the file. Check the box then click “OK”.

If you were experiencing the same issue that I was, you should now be able to reopen the installer file and click the link to start a new installation, and move on with your day.

Summary

There seems to be a bug with the installer for SQL Server 2022 where clicking the option to start a new installation seems to do nothing. This bug can be resolved by “Unblocking” the installer file through the Properties dialog of the file.

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash
September 17, 2024 / 2 Comments

How to Download SQL Server 2022

You would think that figuring out how to download the installer for SQL Server 2022 Standard or Enterprise editions would be a simple task, much like the process for how you download any other installer or ISO for any other version of SQL Server. But with 2022, Microsoft seems to have changed their method for getting the software to people, making it a lot more locked down than other versions are. I’m not sure why this change was made, and if you have some insight please feel free to share it in a comment, but it was made and I have finally figured out how to get that installer with this new system. It took my colleagues and I a whole work day to figure this out. We had to work with our Microsoft account managers to get to the bottom of it, and it seems a little crazy to me that it would be that unintuitive to find the ISO for this software.

What’s in this post

Background

In my company’s current architecture, we create SQL Server virtual machines (VMs) by creating standard Windows servers through the Azure portal, and then one of the database developers will logon to the VM and install SQL Server through the ISO/installer, instead of creating a SQL Server VM from a provided image in Azure. In the past, when we needed to install SQL Server onto a VM, we would google something like “SQL Server 2019 download” and click on the link that takes you to the Microsoft downloads page, and then get the ISO from there. When we tried to do the same for SQL Server 2022, we were taken to a downloads page that only allowed you to download Developer or Express editions, and if we wanted to do Standard or Enterprise, we could only get an evaluation version after providing our information to start a free trial.

We obviously did not want a short trial version of the software, we wanted the full Standard edition, but could not find a full installer/ISO for that version. For a few months, we gave up and installed 2019 instead of 2022 whenever we needed to create a new server, but we reached a point where we are required to use 2022 for some applications, so I set out to find out how to get the Standard edition of SQL Server.

The Proper Method

There are two different ways that we found we could get a Standard or Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2022, and I’ll start with the method that I think they’re intending people to use. If your organization uses SQL Server in Azure already, you will likely need to go through this same method to get the installer for 2022.

I unfortunately can’t get any screenshots of this method of the process because I’m not an elevated user in our organization, but there is a way for your Azure tenant owner (and a few other select individuals) to get the latest ISOs and installers for every piece of Microsoft software your company has licenses for. I believe it is at admin.microsoft.com, but you can talk to your account representative to find out for sure. You can then navigate to “Billing” and then “Your Products” and then “Volume Licensing” where you can view all your licenses and get the downloads for them.

This is how we resolved the installer issue in our organization; we had our tenant owner download the ISO from this location and save the file in a shared location. Going forward, whenever we need an installer for any Microsoft product that we use, we will be required to have that one person download the files and send it to us (not a super convenient method if you’re a developer that doesn’t have full access to your entire Azure tenant).

Once you have the ISO, you can run it as you usually would to install any version of SQL Server, and your license key will be prefilled into the installer so you don’t need to worry about specifying that at any time during the installation process.

The Workaround Method

Before we had talked to our Microsoft account managers, this is the route we were going to use to be able to install SQL Server 2022 on our VMs. Go to the SQL Server 2022 page on the Microsoft website (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads) then download the “Developer Edition”.

After you download that version, run the installer that you downloaded. When it first opens, click the option that says “Download Media”:

On the next page, click “Download”, which will download the ISO for SQL Server:

After the ISO file has downloaded, double-click on the file in File Explorer, which will mount a “DVD” to your system, which will open another directory. In that directory, double-click on “setup.exe” to run the installer for SQL Server.

When the installer window opens, click on the “Installation” page from the left-hand pane, then click on the first link that says “New SQL Server standalone installation or add features to an existing installation”.

If you have an issue where clicking that link doesn’t open anything else, seems to do nothing, check out my other post about how to resolve that issue.

Click “Next” multiple times to move through the initial installation steps for SQL Server 2022. Review the information on each page before moving past it to ensure the settings are what you want them to be. When you come to the following page, keep the radio button for “Perform New Installation” selected then click “Next” again.

The “Edition” page is the one we’ve been needing to get to. On this page, you can change the selection from “Specify a free edition” to either one of the other two options to install Standard or Enterprise editions.

If you select the option for “Use Pay-As-You-Go billing through Microsoft Azure”, there is a dropdown menu that will let you specify Standard or Enterprise editions. Note that going with this option would then later require you to specify Azure Subscription information to bill the server usage to.

If you select the option for “Enter the product key”, you can then give a license key for SQL Server 2022 if you already have one. Review the two optional checkboxes under the license key box to select any options that apply to you. It looks like if you don’t specify a license key after choosing this option, you can still move forward with the installation, but there must be some point in the future of using the software where you’ll be required to provide a license key to keep using it.

Note: If you go through the “proper method” I listed above, the license key should be prefilled in the third option when you get to this page with the properly downloaded ISO file. For our situation, we also need to make sure the checkbox below the license key box “I have a SQL Server license with Software Assurance or SQL Software Subscription” is checked, since we use Software Assurance for our licensing.

After you’ve made your selections for the “Edition” page of the installer, you are ready to move through the rest of the installation process, specifying whatever options required for your own version of SQL Server.

Summary

There are two different methods I have found for getting the installer for SQL Server 2022 Standard edition, and neither of them are necessarily intuitive. Based on your needs, you can choose either the “proper” or the “workaround” methods. I hope this tutorial has helped you download the software without having to spend a day figuring it out like my coworkers and I had to.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash
September 11, 2024 / 0 Comments

Oracle Cloud World 2024- Day 2 In Review

I am going to try to keep this post shorter than yesterday’s because today was an ever longer conference day for me, and I followed it up by doing some sightseeing in Vegas for the entire evening afterwards. Overall, my sentiment of the day is that a good portion of the sessions are not what I was hoping for or needing in my Oracle journey right now.

Once again, I did learn a lot of new things, but so many of those things aren’t applicable to our Oracle systems at my current job. I think a big part of that is due to the fact that Oracle is basically a side database for us, not the main databases we are developing with the majority of the time. Many of the sessions I’ve attended in the conference so far have been targeted at developers who solely develop in the Oracle ecosystem, doing more advanced developing than anything I’ve needed to do with our Oracle databases. That’s not really a fault of the sessions, more of a mismatch of my needs and wants with the main target audience of the conference.

What’s in this post

Keynote 1: Discover the Power of Oracle AI in Oracle Fusion Applications

This was another keynote where many incredible statements were made about the influence and reach of Oracle, specifically in relation to Large Language Models (LLMs) and other aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of my to-do items for after the conference is to complete my own research to fact-check these grandiose statements that have been made throughout the conference.

The main point of this keynote was to once again talk to large customers of Oracle that are utilizing AI in there internal corporate systems or “at the edge” with their own customers. I thought a lot of the use cases presented were interesting, like how Caesar’s uses AI to speed up check-in and check-out and other customer-facing features of their resorts and casinos. I also liked many of the presented AI agents and features that Oracle has been working on, like the ability to automate a lot of the more tedious aspects of database management or day-to-day tasks of accountants and other parts of businesses to free up human time for better things.

This session is the epitome of what I wish every session at the conference would be. Although if they were all like this, I think I would be extremely overwhelmed with information. This was by far my favorite session of the day. The topic of the session was vector search and how it relates to artificial intelligence, and the presenters did a fantastic job at explaining the general technology concepts while at the same time sprinkling in a few plugs for how Oracle is doing those things and doing them better than current standards with their new services. I cannot validate whether or not Oracle’s versions of vector search and vector databases are better than their competitors, but this session was extremely informative and cleared up a lot of topics I have been unclear on when it comes to AI.

Best Practices for Oracle Integration and OCI Process Automation

This was the second best session I attended today. What I liked most about this presentation is it was 100% what I expected based on the title and abstract. They had concise, to the point slides covering exactly what you need to know to make the best of your Oracle Integration and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure systems. Plus they also had the proper presentation layout recommended by communications classes, where they first gave us a quick overview of what they were going to cover, then they covered that information, then they gave a quick summary of what they had covered. The presentation was well-organized, the presenters were funny, and the information was useful.

Keynote 2: Solving Industries’ Biggest Challenges with Applied AI

This was yet another keynote where a top leader at Oracle interviewed various customers about how they are using Oracle’s AI tools to solve their biggest problems. While hearing testimonials like these are nice, I really don’t need to hear as many of them as I’ve heard from the keynotes in the past two days. Not the worst thing ever, but I feel like picking a different conflicting session might have provided more useful information for me.

A Simple Python, Flask Application with Oracle REST APIs

This hands-on lab definitely did not go the way the presenters wanted to, which seems to happen with a good portion of lives demos. It seems like the system our lab sandboxes were built on was not built strong enough to handle the load we were putting on it, since there were over 20 people in the session. I think the content of what we were supposed to be learning was really interesting, but only one person in the class could get the system to work, so he became the unintended example for the rest of us to watch. So shoutout to that Norwegian man who had the luck of the draw getting the web app to work.

What I realized as I was reviewing the lab code was that Flask and ORDS (Oracle REST Data Services) Python code is formatted very similarly to how Azure Functions are formatted. Which makes sense since both frameworks are allowing you to easily work with REST APIs without having to do a lot of the more tedious work yourself. Thankfully the leader of the workshop, who wrote all the code (it’s not his fault the sandboxes weren’t working because it seemed to be a network or VM issue), has the entire code example saved on his public GitHub so that I can download it and play with it on my own in the near future to play around with REST APIs in the Oracle workspace.

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) for the Oracle Database Developer

This was one of my least favorite sessions of the day simply for the fact that I was expecting a session that covered Oracle-specific CI/CD practices, but instead, the content of the presentation was mostly generalized information about CI/CD, which I’m already familiar with. At some point in the future, I am now going to need to research the standard ways people normally do CI/CD in the Oracle environment to see if there’s anything we can or should use in our own Oracle systems.

One tidbit that was mentioned during the presentation that really brought be back in time about a year was hearing that the Oracle tool SQLcl is based on Liquibase, which is a open-source database change management tool I did a proof of concept project on at my last job. If you are interested in learning more about what I learned while doing a trial with Liquibase, you can read my post about it.

Summary

Today was really difficult for me to get through, because the day felt extremely long. I think about half the sessions I attended were useful to me while the others were not as useful. I have a whole list of random topics I’ve gathered from the presentations today that I want to research further, so that is the brightest side of today at the conference. Tomorrow is the last day of the conference, and only a half day, so I am going to try to make the most of it and learn as much from my last few sessions as possible.

Have you also been at Oracle Cloud World this year or have gone in previous years? If so, I would love to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Photo by Headway on Unsplash
September 10, 2024 / 0 Comments

Oracle Cloud World 2024- Day 1 In Review

Today was my first day at Oracle Cloud World in Las Vegas, and also my first time ever at an Oracle conference, since I only recently started doing database administration with this RDBMS. As with any technology conference, the day was jam-packed with many different sessions. Although I obviously cannot convey all the information I learned at my sessions throughout the day, I will try to summarize the interesting and key points I took away from each.

What’s in this post

Keynote Session 1: “Customers Winning with the Cloud and AI”

I’m not going to lie, I went into this conference and this sessions not having a great opinion of Oracle, due to the multiple negative experiences I had with their database platform in the past few months. However, this keynote was not a useless session, because I did learn that MGM Resorts owns a huge number of properties and hotels in Las Vegas, which is interesting from a big data perspective, and that the CIA is the first customer of Oracle. There are a lot of rumors online about how Oracle came to be and how it may or may not relate to a CIA project codename, but I couldn’t find any reputable sources, so we’ll just leave it at the CIA being the first and one of the largest customers of Oracle.

Besides those interesting tidbits, this keynote mainly contained somewhat dry interviews with different large customers of Oracle talking about how they’ve utilized Oracle products to revolutionize their businesses and how they’ve started to use AI in their technology journeys. This was the beginning of discussions surrounding “AI” that continued throughout most of the sessions today. (On that topic, I’m starting to feel like the term “AI” is being watered down or misused at this conference to represent things that really shouldn’t fall under that term…)

“Accelerate Your IAM Modernization to Multi-cloud Deployments”

This session was not what I expected it was going to be, and it wasn’t the only one where that happened today. However, even though the content of this session wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, I did learn a few interesting things. The presenters gave many startling facts about the costs associated with data breaches as well as the causes of those breaches. The statistic that I found most interesting is their claim that 60% of breaches resulted from poor patch management.

I was hoping that this presentation was going to cover more of the technical details of implementing and modernizing IAM within the Oracle ecosystem, but it proved to be a general overview of what everyone should be doing instead, which was what disappointed me about it. However, it at least gave me some topics that I can do further research on by myself to learn more about IAM in Oracle, such as the Oracle Access Manager. At least if I couldn’t get the technical details I wanted, I still got some direction about what to research next.

“Create a Data Pipeline with Data Transforms in Autonomous Database Data Studio”

This presentation was more the style of what I was expecting of most of the sessions I chose today, but it once again covered completely different information than what I thought it would. This session was different than what I expected because I was not aware that “Data Transforms” is an Oracle product; I thought that it was being used as a general term in the title. If I had known that the presentation would be covering a specific service, I would have had a better understanding of what I was about to learn. My confusion of expectations did not make the presentation unenjoyable or uninformative, though.

What I learned from this session is that Oracle has two different ETL platforms available to move data around, similar to how Microsoft has SSIS for SQL Server (and other databases). Data Transforms was the service covered by this session, but they did mention Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) which is another, older ETL service. Data Transforms can move data between tons of different types of databases, not just Oracle, and it seemed to have a lot of interesting and easy to use ETL capabilities. It seems like they are trying to make this tool be the data flow tool of the future, especially since they covered 3 different features that are about to be added, like vector search/query capabilities. Although I haven’t had the chance to use this tool myself, I want to temper the expectations for what it can accomplish due to my own personal experiences with other Oracle services. Maybe it’s as fantastic and as useful as they say it is, or maybe it’s just another sales pitch that is better than the real user experience. If you have personal experience, good or bad, with Data Transforms I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

Keynote Session 2: “Oracle Vision and Strategy”

Of all the sessions today, I think this one had the most interesting pieces of information, although none of it was directly applicable to me or my company. The biggest downside of this keynote was that it went way over time, so I had to head out before the end of it. The two major topics of the keynote, presented by Larry Ellison, the founder and CTO of Oracle, were the joining of Oracle Cloud with the other major cloud providers and then covering various different topics surrounding artificial intelligence and how they want to use it to fix all the problems of the application and database development world.

While I like the idea of them putting Oracle databases into the other cloud platforms–Google Cloud Platform, AWS, and Azure–because it gives me hope that maybe one day we could migrate our Oracle databases to a less fragile ecosystem, it did leave me wondering if one day in the future there will just be one single mega-cloud system and monopoly originating from the combination of the current big four (but maybe I’ve just been reading too many dystopian novels lately).

I thought the second part of the keynote, surrounding current and potential uses of AI integration with other software systems, was more interesting and also a bit scary. Interesting in that automating mundane and error-prone processes makes our lives as database developers and administrators easier. There are so many things Mr. Ellison mentioned automating with AI that sounded great and useful to me. But it also scared me a bit, as it felt like there was an undertone of invasiveness being discussed under the guise of security. Security, on the technological and physical level, is important for individuals, groups, and even our whole country, but I personally believe security should not come at the cost of personal freedom and privacy. Some of the proposed and planned uses of AI, specifically how it relates to biometric authentication for every aspect of our lives, left me feeling a little uneasy (but once again, maybe it’s due to the large number of dystopian books I’ve read lately).

“Access Governance: The Key to Ensuring the Survival of Our Digital Lives”

I think this session was the best presentation of the day, as far as straight communication abilities go. The team of presenters was very well put together and knew their topics well without having to read off their slides at all, and I really appreciated that.

The topic of this session was once again about managing who can access what, including the use of Identity and Access Management (IAM) as one of the core topics. The presentation was lead by a member of the Oracle leadership team, who was accompanied by three Oracle customers, including a senior security engineer from Uber. Hearing from the different customers about their experience using IAM in general, not just the Oracle services, offered a great perspective on managing access to applications and databases, and gave me some ideas to take back to my own work. The main Oracle services covered were Oracle Access Governance and the Intelligent Access Dashboard, which I’ll need to do further research on myself now.

“AI-Based Autoscaling with Avesha for Simplified OKE Management on OCI”

This was my last session of the day, and although I was tired and dreaming of my hotel room, I did find it to be another interesting presentation, although not super applicable to my work life. The title is quite a mouthful, but what it covered was how a small company called Avesha has created 4 different tools to help you autoscale and manage Kubernetes clusters in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Their 4 tools all seemed like they would be very useful for people who are working with Kubernetes in Oracle, since apparently the autoscaling in OCI doesn’t always work as well as people want it to (coming from comments from the audience during the Q&A at the end of the presentation).

While I don’t think my company will be using any of Avesha’s tools anytime soon, they did seem like they could be extremely useful to other organizations. And the presenters definitely understood their own products, down to the fine details of how they work, which is always a green flag I appreciate with software vendors.

Summary

Wooh, that was a lot of information to recap and cover for a blog post! After attending these six sessions on this first day of Oracle Cloud World, I’m a little bit overwhelmed an exhausted, and not quite ready for another day and a half of more info dumps. But that’s okay because it’s what’s to be expected from conferences like this. I am hoping that the sessions I picked for tomorrow are more applicable to my current role, but even if they aren’t, I’m sure I’ll learn more interesting things throughout the day.

Image showing white coffee mug and open notebook sitting on white table
May 14, 2024 / 0 Comments

Handy Use of a SQL Cursor

Welcome to another coffee break post where I quickly write up something on my mind that can be written and read in less time than a coffee break takes.

Several months ago I ran into a situation where I needed to update the records in one table based on values in a related reference table. To do this update, I was going to need to run an existing stored procedure once for every record in the reference table, which I believe contained information about countries and markets within those countries. The reference table looked something like this:

The stored procedure I needed to run had input parameters for CountryID and MarketID as well as several other things that aren’t important for this post. When I was originally looking at this task I needed to complete, I was not looking forward to running the stored procedure manually dozens of times, one for each combination of Country and Market. But I knew there must be a better way. I’m a programmer, I can find a way to automate this tediousness.

A practical use for a cursor

If you’ve developed SQL code for any length of time, you’ve probably heard an older DBA or database developer tell you to never use cursors! I know that I personally have been reminded of that many times, so I had never even considered using one or tried to use one. But when I was staring down the barrel of updating two values in a procedure execution call, running it, waiting for several minutes for the procedure to complete, then doing it all over again, for dozens of times, I knew I had to give a cursor a try.

I of course had to Google how to write a cursor, since I had never done that before, but was quickly able to write a script I would need. The cursor was created to loop over every record retrieved from the reference table using a query I wrote, and injected each of the CountryID and MarketID values into the input parameters of the stored procedure. This easily automated the tedious manual work that I would have needed to do myself, and it did it in a lot less time since it wasn’t a user having to slowly update each relevant value each time they needed to change.

Summary

Maybe cursors aren’t quite the devil I always believed them to be. I know they can certainly cause performance issues on databases when they’re written into stored procedures and ran regularly, turning what should be set-based work into row-based work, but I have learned that there is at least one fantastic use. And this use will make my life easier going forward any time I need to run one stored procedure a lot of times with different input values.

Sources

Here is the main StackOverflow answer I used to help me write my own query: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2077967. And you can see, the first comment of this answer is literally calling cursors evil, which I find amusing.

Picture of boxes and plant on desk as if someone is moving
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May 9, 2024 / 0 Comments

Taking a Break and Switching Things Up

If you know me personally or follow me on LinkedIn, then you know that several weeks ago I made the decision to leave my friends and colleagues at Scentsy to take a new role at Boise Cascade. I made this decision for a lot of different reasons, but the main one being that I felt like I needed more of a challenge and wanted to get back into development work rather than focusing on project organization and management.

I am just about through my third week in my new role and it has been a scary, tiring, interesting, and even a bit fun, experience. Starting any new job comes with some new stress as I adjust to the environment and coworkers, and while I’m not completely out of the adjustment phase yet, I am already becoming more comfortable in this role so thought I should come here and give an update.

Previously, this blog has been heavily focused on cloud development with AWS since that is what I was developing in daily at Scentsy. But with my new role, I am drinking from a firehose to start learning cloud development in Azure, so my posts will be switching to focus on that platform instead. As of right now, I have no plans to do any personal development projects in AWS to be able to continue content in that space. I am really excited to be learning about Azure though, and am equally excited to start sharing what I learn about it here on my blog, since it seems like the Azure documentation is just as hard to understand, interpret and use as the AWS documentation is. So I will have plenty of my own learnings to share.

In my new role, I am also jumping into the deep end with scripting in Python which I am loving (but of course having issues with just like any other platform), so I will be starting to share some of my learnings about that space as well. Plus, there’s always a possibility I’ll be learning some other new technology because of how diverse my new role is, so my content going forward might be a lot more diverse than it was in the past.

It may take a few more weeks for me to get into the swing of things enough at my new job to feel like I have something worth posting about here, so I hope you’ll stick around and give the new content a read once it comes out. And as always, if there is anything in particular you would like me to write about, let me know in the comments and I will try to get to it!

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