Category: Database Tools (page 1 of 2)

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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 My team had an ETL that broke because it could no longer communicate with our customer’s software due to an outdated security certificate.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.

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September 17, 2024 / 1 Comment

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.

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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.

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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.

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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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April 16, 2024 / 0 Comments

Two Useful Keyboard Shortcuts for SSMS

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.

This morning I was doing my normal work when I had a realization that I should share something I find super useful and use frequently use in SSMS that a lot of developers seem to not know about. They are small actions but they make your life easier when doing a lot of query editing in SSMS.

How to Minimize the Results Window

I have told many developers about this keyboard shortcut and they all appreciated it. I’m sure most people that frequently work in SSMS would like to be able to minimize and maximize the results window as needed in order to give themselves more screen real estate to work with while coding but still be able to see their query results as needed. But there is no minimize button for the results window of SSMS.

The only way that I know of to minimize and then maximize the results window in SSMS is to do CTRL + R. I use this keyboard shortcut every day at work while writing queries or updating existing queries.

How to Refresh the Intellisense

I have also had to tell many developers about updating the intellisense suggestions of SSMS since it will often trip them up if they don’t know how it works. First, you should understand that the intellisense offered by SSMS is only accurate as of the time you opened your query window or changed the connection for the query window (usually). If you’ve been working in the same query window for a while and have made DDL changes to any tables, functions, stored procedures, etc., intellisense is likely out of date and could tell you that a table or column you’re trying to reference doesn’t exist when you know it does.

If you ever run into this situation where it’s telling you something doesn’t exist but you know it does, use CTRL + SHIFT + R and the intellisense suggestions/corrections will be updated.

Bonus shortcut for Red-Gate SQL Prompt

Similar to the intellisense built in to SSMS, if you are using the SQL Prompt tool from Red-Gate, you can run into the same issue with the tool not recognizing that objects or columns exist when you know that they do. If you run into that issue and would like to update the suggestions list for SQL Prompt, use CTRL + SHIFT + D.

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March 5, 2024 / 0 Comments

Getting SQL Prompt to Prompt on RDS Servers

This may seem like a ridiculous thing to need to write about, making the Red-Gate tool SQL Prompt generate prompts like it should, but I have been having a weird issue with it over the past couple months and have finally learned the solution. So of course I thought I should share it!

What is SQL Prompt?

SQL Prompt is a tool made by Red-Gate that works as a much cleaner, nicer, and more useful autocomplete feature for SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It is a plugin you install to SSMS that then seems to magically work to help you write queries faster. Not only does this tool autocomplete databases, schemas, tables, and column names for you in your queries, but it also provides a lot of other useful tools like a Snippets Manager, which allows you to use default and custom snippets to write code faster (e.g. writing “sf” then pressing Tab will type out “SELECT * FROM” for you so all you need to type is the table name you want to select from).

Every developer in my organization uses this tool heavily in our day-to-day operations while writing any SQL scripts because it makes writing queries so much faster. So when my SQL Prompt seemed to stop working after an update, I was getting really frustrated because it meant I had to write all of my SQL queries manually again. And when all you do all day is write SQL, that adds up to a significant hindrance to your work speed.

My Problem

The problem I was having with SQL Prompt was that when I connected to any of our RDS database instances, the tool would no longer do any prompting of schemas, tables, or columns which was making my coding life so much harder. Oddly, the snippets manager portion of the tool was still working fine, so at least I wasn’t needing to type out the queries I normally use the snippets shortcuts for. Also oddly, Prompt would work perfectly fine connecting to other databases that weren’t on RDS instances, it was only happening for RDS databases.

I dealt with this issue for months on our production server, since I figured it was due to the security settings or something else I wouldn’t be able to fix, and I don’t access prod servers very frequently, so when I did use them and the Prompt wasn’t working, it wasn’t as bothersome. But after I had to completely reset my developer computer and reinstalled SQL Prompt, I started having this same issue for our lower environment databases, that I work with every day, so Prompt not prompting was suddenly a big deal.

The Solution

I created a support ticket with Red-Gate since I’ve always had good luck with their support services. This time wasn’t any different. Within a couple hours of creating the ticket, I had an email from a support rep asking me if I had tried checking the “Trust Server Certificate” check box on the Connection Properties tab while connecting to the RDS servers. No, I had not done that because I did not know that was an option before that day.

I disconnected from the RDS server then reconnected, making sure to check that box before clicking “Connect”, and now I had SQL Prompt back up and working, providing prompts of schemas, tables, and columns just like I want it to. Yay!

I also logged onto our prod server to see if doing the same thing there would fix that issue, and it fixed Prompt there as well. I am so excited to be able to not type out every detail of every SQL query again!

I love quick fixes like this.

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February 27, 2024 / 0 Comments

Why CFTs Take so Long to Delete

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.

Background

Recently, I went through an AWS workshop for Lake Formation, a data lake management tool in AWS, and that workshop had me create many different Cloud Formation Templates (CFTs) to spin up services to use in the workshop. After I finished that, I then had to go through my development AWS account for work and clean up everything that had been created so we stopped paying for these services I no longer needed.

While attempting to delete the many CFTs I had used, I saw one that was seemingly stuck in the DELETE_IN_PROGRESS state for almost 20 minutes. I did not realize it would take so long to delete one CFT and was getting worried that it was actually stuck. So I started searching online to see if this has happened to others as well.

Why does the delete take so long?

I found this Reddit post of someone reporting the same thing, and it linked to a very informative answer to a similar question on Stack Overflow. I would recommend you go and read that detailed answer there for the best understanding of why CFTs sometimes take forever to delete.

The simple answer is that is just how it is. My CFT in question had set up a lot of Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) as well as other resources, and some of those items simply take awhile to delete.

Even though I can’t speed up the deletion process for these big CFTs, at least now I know that in the future, should I need to delete any other large CFTs from my AWS account, I can expect it might take longer than I would anticipate to complete.

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