The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
Text Delimiters and CSVs
From Mark G: “I was teaching some new sql developers about export to text/csv files using wizard. When it got to having a text qualified value of NONE or actually putting in something such as “, the question came up Why would someone put something in there.”
This led to a fair amount of ranting on my part, as well as Solomon calling me out for using the term “quoted delimiter” as a sloppy combination of “quoted identifier” and “text delimiter.” I complained a lot about how PolyBase quoted identifiers don’t actually do anything useful and how you have to be careful about each CSV parser because they all seem to behave differently.
DBCC REINDEX and Always Encrypted
Bob also e-mailed and had a strange error when running DBCC REINDEX to rebuild an index with Always Encrypted enabled:
Msg 206, Level 16, State 2, Line 3 Operand type clash: nvarchar(max) encrypted with (encryption_type = ‘DETERMINISTIC’, encryption_algorithm_name = ‘AEAD_AES_256_CBC_HMAC_SHA_256’, column_encryption_key_name = ‘CEK_Auto1’, column_encryption_key_database_name = ‘DBNAME’) is incompatible with varchar DBCC execution completed. If DBCC printed error messages, contact your system administrator. Completion time: 2021-07-30T17:53:06.1301441-04:00
Fortunately, Bob was able to find an answer pretty quickly, and the solution follows classic Microsoft error policy where the error message is technically correct but not helpful in discovering the cause.
In this case, Bob’s answer was to drop auto-generated statistics on the table and then rebuild the index again. That happened to work out just fine.
CycleCloud
Mike wrapped us up with a quick discussion of CycleCloud, an interesting way to scale up and down VM resources in Azure. Unlike platform-as-a-service offerings, which tend to have sliders to control this sort of thing, VMs don’t have an easy answer. This still isn’t an easy answer, but it’s definitely easier.