Tools to connect to a SQL database

Today I'm getting back to basics, whether you are new or veteran with the database engine you need a tool to get into, write queries, do some monitoring, tuning, etc.

If you have been using SQL for at least 5 years or any version older than SQL Server 2016 you will mostly only know one tool, as it was included with the installation media, however there are other tools available that you can use with which you can achieve the same goal, and at the same time offer some other benefits. In this post I will be writing about the top 3 and that are developed by Microsoft that you can use, in another posts I'll evaluate some others but for now lets use focus on this 3.

1. SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) - SQL Server Data Tools, was introduced as an add-on with Visual Studio 2012 meaning that it has been here for a while now, it offered a lot of features that you can only find with third party tools at an extra cost such as schema and data comparison between two databases, it also offered connectivity with a Team Foundation Services Server (TFS) among other features. In later versions you begin to be able to develop Reporting Services reports with SSDT, so it removed the need of installing the Software Development Kit within your database server or sharing some installation media with other teams for them to develop or update SSRS Reports. With the latest version you are able to connect to SQL Servers from 2005, Azure SQL, Azure SQL Data Warehouse and SQL Server 2017 on Linux. It doesn't requires any license to be installed. If you are more familiar with Visual Studio, it is easier for you to adapt to this one or even better, you can add this package to your installation and work from there without the need on having a separate tool to do the database part. You can see the official documentation and download it from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssdt/download-sql-server-data-tools-ssdt?view=sql-server-2017

2.  SQL Operations Studio - SQL Operations Studio is a multi-platform tool you can use to connect to databases, if you are bored and tired of the limitation that SQL Server Management Studio offered or that there was no Data Tools for Linux, let me tell you that this is your tool, you can run Operations Studio on Windows, macOS and Linux. With this tool you can do almost all the administrative and development work you used to do with SSMS, there are still some items missing from SSMS, however most of the ones you used on a daily basis are here. It also includes a lot of reports you are used to see in SSMS with richer format. It doesn't requires any license to be purchased. It is a light weight file compared with the traditional management studio. You can download it for free here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-operations-studio/download?view=sql-server-2017

3. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) - As I said at the beginning of this post, if you have been using SQL Server for at least 5 years, or if you have installed any SQL Server version older than SQL 2016, you might noticed that with SQL Server 2016 there was a big change with the installation media, and is that it didn't include the option of "Management tools" instead it was in a different section in the welcome screen of the setup and when you click on it, it route you to download the media, this because of a lot of different reasons (Performance, Security and starting SQL 2017 multi-platform). This tool continues to be the most utilized tool to manage and interact with databases whether you are running your database on-premises or cloud. The good thing of this change is that if you are not installing a SQL engine in your desktop you don't need the entire media that included the setup files for the SQL engine, instead you just download the latest version and there you have it, also in the past you could only download the express version for free which was very limited or download the media containing the Development version for SQL, that is no longer the case, with the current release format you will have all the features supported. It has improved a lot from the versions we used to know, as now you can develop your own monitoring reports with SSRS and import those into SSMS and have that visibility from there, for example if you have a ad-hoc query to monitor your SQL Servers you can convert it as a report and integrate it with your SSMS and you will no longer need to open a new query window and run it, instead you just run your report and presto!

You can download the latest version from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-2017

Hope that this quick review help you get a better idea and start your desire to test different tools.

Thanks for reading!

Configure Always on AG with SQL 2017

One of the new features that we have with SQL 2017 is that you no longer need a Windows cluster to enable the AlwaysOn feature with SQL server (remember we discuss the requirements to configure that here those are valid for versions 2012 to 2016) , if you want to review what's new in SQL 2017 you can check it here.

In this post I'll be showing you how to configure an Always On availability group with SQL Server 2017, most of the steps are the same for the older versions and I'll be telling the differences on each of the steps so lets get started.
First I'll amuse you already have SQL Server installed in two servers as stand alone instances, that is a requirement for this post.

1. Enabling AlwaysOn: In order to do that, you need to go to SQL Server Configuration Manager, and on the SQL Server Services, hit properties over the MSSQLSERVER

2.   In the properties window, look for "AlwaysOn High Availability", if you are running with an older version, the checkbox "Enable AlwaysOn Availability Groups" won't be availabile until you make the machine where SQL Server part of a cluster but just part of the windows cluster, the SQL Server instance remains as an Stand Alone type. Once that you have the checkbox enabled, check it, and click apply and Ok. Enabling this feature requires a Service restart so take that in account. Also, you need to do this in all the SQL instances that will be part of the Availability Group.

3. Go to SQL Management studio, connect to any of the SQL instances that will be part of the group, look for the "Always On High Availability" folder, expand it and you will see a folder with the name "Availability Groups" do a right click on it and select "New Availability Group Wizard…" 

4. In the availability group wizard, configure the name you want for your availability group.

a. Cluster Type (New with SQL 2017): you have 2 options here (the official documentation shows 3),          External or None, if you choose External, it means that you will joining this availability group to an external cluster, E.g. if you have a windows cluster on your primary datacenter that is on a different network or you want to add it to a Linux cluster.
b. Database health level detection (New with SQL 2017), this will enable a constant validation of the databases that are part of the availability group that if anything goes wrong with any of the databases it will trigger an automatic failover
c. Per Database DTC support (New with 2016 SP1) Allows the Distributed Transaction Coordinator through the availability group, feature that was not available in older versions of SQL (2012 and 2014)

If you don't have a cluster created and just like this scenario, choose NONE



5. Select the databases that will be part of the availability group. Requisites for a database to be considered:
     a. Be on Full recovery model
     b. Have a full backup
 

6. In here you will be choosing the replicas that you want to add to your group. Important features here:

1. Initial Role: You will set the role that each replica will have once that the group becomes available
2. Failover Mode: Manual or Automatic
3. Availability Mode: Synchronous commit or Asynchronous commit
4. Readable Secondary: No, Yes - Read Intent Only and Yes. If you choose No or Yes - Read Intent Only, you won't be available to query your replicas, the Read Intent is when you enable that feature that routes the read operations to your available replicas. With the Yes option you will be able to query the databases in your replica.
5. The endpoints tab will show you the URL and ports each replica is set to.
6. Backup preferences tab: in here you can configure if you want to take the backups from the primary or the secondary servers.
7. Listener tab: In this window it lets you set the parameters to configure the availability group listener, however my advice is to do it later, configure your group first and once that is done, configure it later.
8. Read-Only Routing: tab This lets you configure your read only routing for the read-intent setup, this allows you to load balance the queries so you have only the queries that will Insert, Delete or Update on the primary and all the Select queries routed to your secondary's so they don't consume resources the Primary will use (I'll explain it in another post) 

7. 

1. Automatic seeding (Starting SQL 2016): With this type, SQL Server will do everything for you, it will use the default folders configured so make sure you have enough space available on it.
2. Full database and log backup: Same as the Automatic seeding, however in this case it lets you choose where do you want to generate the backups
3. Join Only: With this one, you do prepare everything in your replica, important notice, you do a restore with norecovery in your replica and apply at least one log backup. This option is useful with really large databases.
4. Skip initial data synchronization: Same as before, however in this particular one, you need to restore everything just at the time before initializing the synchronization otherwise it will tell you that there are items pending to be restored.
5. Failover Mode: Manual or Automatic
6. Availability Mode: Synchronous commit or Asynchronous commit
7. Readable Secondary: No, Yes - Read Intent Only and Yes. If you choose No or Yes - Read Intent Only, you won't be available to query your replicas, the Read Intent is when you enable that feature that routes the read operations to your available replicas. With the Yes option you will be able to query the databases in your replica.
8. The endpoints tab will show you the URL and ports each replica is set to.
9. Backup preferences tab: in here you can configure if you want to take the backups from the primary or the secondary servers.
10. Listener tab: In this window it lets you set the parameters to configure the availability group listener, however my advice is to do it later, configure your group first and once that is done, configure it later.
11. Read-Only Routing: tab This lets you configure your read only routing for the read-intent setup, this allows you to load balance the queries so you have only the queries that will Insert, Delete or Update on the primary and all the Select queries routed to your secondary's so they don't consume resources the Primary will use (I'll explain it in another post) 

8. Verify that the validation runs successfully, this warning is because I didn't setup the listener in step 6, but that is fine, every time that I've tried to configure it from the very first page it fails, so my advice is that you configure it later (part of this post).

9.  After hitting finish and if none of the steps have failed you will see the screen just like this.

Setup of the listener

1. The listener will be your single point of entry for your availability group, no matter which server is primary and which secondary, you will only need to configure your applications to use the Listener fqn or the ip and that will give you that High Availability you are looking with Always On.
   1. Go to the "Always On High Availability" folder, expand your availability group and look for the "Availability group listener" and right click on it.
   
   
   2. In the Configuration screen, Configure the domain name you want your listener to respond onto, this will be like another computer in the domain, so be sure that you have permissions to create objects in the active directory, if you don't ask your domain admin to provision that name and grant you permissions over it so you can enable it.
   1. Configure the port you want the listener to listen to, this needs to be different than the endpoints and than the usual 1433 that the SQL instance will be listen to.
   2. Configure the IP: make sure that its an available IP in the domain, also make sure that you choose the ip from the same subnet that one of your replicas is running.
    
   
   
   
   You are all set, you can start configuring your applications to the listener and taking the advantages always On provides.

Create users in Azure AD

In this post I'll show you how to create new users in your Azure Active Directory so you can use them as service accounts or to grant other users to login to your Servers or services as well as how to enable them so you can use it, I didn't know that and the documentation was not as explicit as you would love, however I consolidate both tasks here.

1. Go to Azure Active Directory 

2. In the "Name" field type in the give name of the user
3. Type the fully qualified name name@domainname.onmicrosoft.com
4. Configure the Profile details
5. It won't let you change the details so you can leave it that way
6. Configure the Groups it will have access to
7. Select the role it will have in the active directory the options are (Regular user, Global Admin, Limited Admin)
8. Password: Make sure to copy the password as you are not able to retrieve it later this is auto generated and you are not able to change it, and the user is configure to change it at the first logon.
9. Before clicking create, your window will have to look like this

Alright, you have your account created, however it wont work until you synchronize the password, or in other words, until you enable your user by logging in to the active directory, however, how can you do that? This is something hard to find out there in the web, even when the steps are simple, reason why I'm including it with this post.

1. Navigate to this URL: http://myapps.microsoft.com/

2. When asked for the logon user, use the one you just created

3. Type in the password you copy from the creation window, then it will route you to this other page where it asks you to configure a new password, type in the new password. 

And you are done, once that you have successfully updated the password it will route you to this screen meaning that you successfully create and activate the account. Now you are ready to use it to join your machines to the domain, configure it as service accounts, etc.

Hope this and the post from last week lets you get started and working with Azure.

Thanks for reading!

Configure an Azure AD Domain Services

Problem: I was working on getting a demo on how to setup Always On with SQL Server 2017 without the need of creating a windows cluster, I had my two VM's in Azure and everything was working fine until the creation of the availability group, it failed and it was because the account under which the server was running was the default "NT Service" which is not allowed (not to mention is a concerning security issue) so instead I decided to join both VMs to a domain, as mentioned before, this were Azure VM's so the creation of a traditional domain as you know it on premises was a hard task to do (not to mention the cost for each of the servers) however by looking through I came across a service, Azure AD Domain Services that provides a seamless experience as a traditional domain controller, but as a service (PaaS) which is great because it does almost everything for you so here are the steps as to how to set that up.

All the steps are in this URL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-domain-services/active-directory-ds-getting-started follow it thoroughly however, here are some annotations from my own experience:

Task 1: "configure basic settings"

DNS domain name: choose the name of your preference with the add of ".onmicrosoft.com" unless you have something else configured it won't check your name as valid.

Resource group: You can create a new resource group or use an existing one, it won't break anything that you have in your group if you choose "Use Existing"

Task 2: "Configure network Settings"

In here you have the option to either Create a new one or use an existing one, my recommendation, create a new one, in my first attempt I choose an existing one and spent 2 days cleaning everything up as in the middle of the creation it fail.

Task 3: "Configure administrative group"

In this task you create the equivalent of "Domain Administrators" group, so make sure that you add the members you want to be domain admins in your Azure AD (AAD).

After finishing this task, it will start the process on provisioning the resources, once this is done, your domain will be almost ready, before that you still need to configure your DNS. How to know when is done? When you go into the overview of the domain you are able to see the section "Update DNS Server settings for your virtual network"

Task 4: "Update DNS Server settings for your virtual network"

Make sure that you choose "custom" and copy both IPs onto the boxes as shown in the steps, this step is so that you can configure you DNS servers with the ip of the services (that will serve as Domain controller servers) Azure provided for you, take this as a verification step of the process.

With that you are done, you have successfully configured your Active directory as a service and you are good to go and work like if you were in an on premises domain, you will only need to configure your accounts to the services or if you didn't do it in the task #3, you can create an account to manage your domain (Join the machines, create other accounts to configure as Service Accounts, ETC).

In a following post I'll show you how to create and enable users in your Azure AD.

Thanks for reading!