Connecting a SQL Server client on Linux using Active Directory authentication

or: How I learned to stop worrying, and love all-caps domain names.

I’m a complete beginner at Linux, so I should preface this post with the fact that these are my humble notes after hours of pulling my hair. It’s not really a fully-fledged how-to article, and there are lot of things I’m not covering. But I figured it may help someone out there at some point.

Is a sort faster when the data is already sorted?

Whenever SQL Server needs to sort a data stream, it will use the Sort operator to reorder the rows of the stream. Sorting data is an expensive operation because it entails loading part or all of the data into memory and shifting that data back and forth a couple of times. The only time SQL Server doesn’t sort the data is when it already knows the data to be ordered correctly, like when it has already passed a Sort operator or it’s reading from an appropriately sorted index.

But what happens if the data is ordered correctly, but SQL Server doesn’t know about it? Let’s find out.

How to run your CTE just once, and re-use the output

You may already know that common table expressions, like views, don’t behave like regular tables. They’re a way to make your query more readable by allowing you to write a complex SQL expression just once, rather than repeating it all over your statement or view. This makes reading, understanding and future refactoring of your code a little less painful.

But they’re no magic bullet, and you may end up with some unexpected execution plans.

Set your Azure VM to auto-shutdown and have it notify you on Slack

Virtual machines cost money when they’re powered on. Most servers obviously need to be on 24 hours a day. Others, like development machines, only have to be on when you’re using them. And if you forget to turn them off, they’ll empty out your Azure credits (or your credit card) before you know it.

Today, I’ll show you how to set an Auto-shutdown time to turn a VM off if you forget, as well as have Azure notify you on Slack 30 minutes ahead of time, so you have the option to postpone or cancel the shutdown.

Consolidating grouped transactions into evenly sized batches

I recently worked with a large set of accounting transactions. I needed to split those rows into multiple logical batches, but each batch had to be logically consistent – among other things, those batches had to be properly balanced, because accounting people are kind of fussy like that.

So I designed a little T-SQL logic that would split all of those transactions into evenly sized batches, without violating their logical groupings.

Safety glasses on. Let’s dive in.