SQL 2017 Machine Learning and Vulnerability Assessment

I’m in the porcess of migrating and upgrading all previous versions of SQL server instances to 2016 at this stage. I’ve started to read about SQL 2017 and cannot wait to test a few new features out.

Vulnerability Assessment (VA) is a new feature of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2017 builds. I’ve tried it as the SSMS installation is seperated from the SQL server isntallation. There are plenty documentation of VA on the web, Microsoft Docs has a good artical on it as well.

Download button for Microsoft Docs

Let me sidetrack to Microsoft Docs for 2 seconds here, I found that not everyone knows that there is a dowload PDF button (see below)! It’s a great option for offline reading.

Back to VA, the tool is light and easy to use but its lacking some features such as export the result to PDF or Excel, it would be great if Database Administrators (DBAs) can run this as a schduled task, etc. I’m sure Microsoft is working on them as I publis this post! 🙂

I’m very interested in the Automatic Tunning and Indexing features for SQL 2017. I’ve listed some reading materials for these at the end of the post. These features obviously will make DBAs’ lives easier in the future but how much control are we willing to relinquish to machine learning? System administrators might be a thing of the past soon.

Reading material:

• What’s new in SQL Server 2017
• Automatic tuning
• Channel 9 video demonstrating the use of Vulnerability Assessment

• sys.dm_db_missing_index_details

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Visual Studio 2017 Prompts For Login

Problem:

I’m not very sure why Visual Studio 2017 continuously prompts me for login today. I entered the username and login successfully then the prompt never disappears and I could not access my VSTS.

Solution:

After some Googling, I found a post discussing the issue. In summary:

There is an issue with the update installer which causes some users’ identity cache to become corrupted, which produces very similar behaviour to the other bug. The following has generally fixed this:

• Close all instances of VS
• Open %LOCALAPPDATA% in File Explorer, e.g. c:\users\\AppData\Local
• Delete the .IdentityService folder
• Launch VS. You’ll have to sign in again

After that it should stop prompting you.

It totally worked for me!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

How to resize a VirtualBox .vmdk file on MacOS

I’ve allocated 30GB for the Windows 10 VirtualBox virtual machine. That amount of storage was short-lived, I installed Visual Studio and a few other development tools, soon,e I needed to expend/resize the hard disk storage.

I’m running Oracle VM VirtualBox Version 5.1.28, the syntax might change in different version of VirtualBox but the steps are the same:

• Start a Terminal session. Terminal program is located in Applications -> Utilities -> Terminals
• My Windows 10 virtual hard disk is in the .vmdk format so I need to convert it to .vdk format first, else I will receive an error like this:

0%...
Progress state: VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR

Virtualbox Virtual Machine Fullscreen

Virtualbox is Oracle‘s free Virtual Machine software. It’s fantastic, reliable and FREE! I’ve used it for a few years now and am loving it. I don’t install new virtual machines often but when I do, I struggle with the steps to enable the Virtual Machines to fullscreen mode. I’m writing this down now for future references.

The instuctions in the post assume that the virtual machine has been installed, for example, I would already done these tasks:

1. donwloaded and installed the virtualbox software from Oracle
2. downloaded and installed Windows 10 from Microsoft

Now, started the virtual machine and check if the virtual machine is shoing  a thick black frame around it when in fullscreen mode. It means that the virtual machine is not displaying the same size as the host machine when in fullscreen mode.

What needs to happen now is to download and install the “Oracle VM Virtual Machine Extension Pack”, then attached the Guest Addition (installed by installing the Extension Pack) as a CD image to the virtual machines so it can be installed locally on the virtual machines. Detailed steps are: