TSQL: Possible to reference different database, depending on the environment? - tsql

So we have the situation where we have two different databases and stored procedures need to reference the other database to get information. We will typically write the query to look like this
select * from Mercury.dbo.MyTable a join Purchasing.dbo.OtherTable b on a.a = b.a
Which works fine for us in Production and our Development environment, but recently we split development into Dev/QA/ST and we have different versions of the databases to match the environments.
Example
Purchasing, PurchasingQA, PurchasingST
Mercury, MercuryQA, MercuryST
So now we are running into issues when we promote code because the stored procs in QA will reference a database for dev..
So my question is how can I change the database that is being accessed based on an environment variable? I have started using DynSQL for this, but this leads to a lot of more difficult to maintain code.
Perhaps is there a way to create a "DB Alias" that is database wide?

You can consider using synonyms for that purpose. In your case just create a synonym referencing other database table, for example:
CREATE SYNONYM MyTable FOR Mercury.dbo.MyTable
Each database will have its own synonyms, but the rest of scripts and stored procedures will be the same.

Related

In DBeaver, how can I run an SQL union query from two different connections..?

We recently migrated a large DB2 database to a new server. It got trimmed a lot in the migration, for instance 10 years of data chopped down to 3, to name a few. But now I find that I need certain data from the old server until after tax season.
How can I run a UNION query in DBeaver that pulls data from two different connections..? What's the proper syntax of the table identifiers in the FROM and JOIN keywords..?
I use DBeaver for my regular SQL work, and I cannot determine how to span a UNION query across two different connections. However, I also use Microsoft Access, and I easily did it there with two Pass-Through queries that are fed to a native Microsoft Access union query.
But how to do it in DBeaver..? I can't understand how to use two connections at the same time.
For instance, here are my connections:
And I need something like this...
SELECT *
FROM ASP7.F_CERTOB.LDHIST
UNION
SELECT *
FROM OLD.VIPDTAB.LDHIST
...but I get the following error, to which I say "No kidding! That's what I want!", lol... =-)
SQL Error [56023]: [SQL0512] Statement references objects in multiple databases.
How can this be done..?
This is not a feature of DBeaver. DBeaver can only access the data that the DB gives it, and this is restricted to a single connection at a time (save for import/export operations). This feature is being considered for development, so keep an eye out for this answer to be outdated sometime in 2019.
You can export data from your OLD database and import it into ASP7 using DBeaver (although vendor tools for this are typically more efficient for this). Then you can do your union as suggested.
Many RDBMS offer a way to logically access foreign databases as if they were local, in which case DBeaver would then be able to access the data from the OLD database (as far as DBeaver is concerned in this situation, all the data is coming from a single connection). In Postgres, for example, one can use a foreign data wrapper to access foreign data.
I'm not familiar with DB2, but a quick Google search suggests that you can set up foreign connections within DB2 using nicknames or three-part-names.
If you check this github issue:
https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver/issues/3605
The way to solve this is to create a task and execute it in different connections:
https://github.com/dbeaver/dbeaver/issues/3605#issuecomment-590405154

db2look from SQL

Is it possible to get the table structure like db2look from SQL?
Or the only way is from command line? Thus, by wrapping a external stored procedure in C I could call the db2look, but that is not what I am looking for.
Clarification added later:
I want to know which tables have the non logged option from SQL.
It is possible to create the table structure from regular SQL and the public DB2 catalog - however, it is complex and requires some deeper skills.
The metadata is available in the DB2 catalog views in the SYSCAT schema. For a regular table you would first start off by looking into the values in SYSCAT.TABLES and SYSCAT.COLUMNS. From there you would need to branch off to other views depending on what table and column options you are after, whether time-travel tables, special partitioning rules, or many other options are involved.
Serge Rielau published an article on developerWorks called Backup and restore SQL schemas for DB2 Universal Database that provides a set of stored procedures that will do exactly what you're looking for.
The article is quite old (2006) so you may need to put some time in to update the procedures to be able to handle features that were added to DB2 since the date of publication, but the procedures may work for you now and are a nice jumping off point.

Multiple database in EF6

We are involved in quite a new development in which we are remaking our current web shop platform.
In the current platform we do not use EF6 neither other ORM but store procedures to access to the db, but in the new building is what we do.
We have a doubt regarding database design of the new platform. In the current platform we use several different databases depending on the content of them.
For example, we have dedicated databases to store information for products catalogs other dedicated db for handling orders.
Currently all data access is done through stored procedures, so we have no problem with the links between different databases.
The problem appears to us now when we have started to use EF6. In this case each DB is associated with a context and it is not possible to know data from one context to another
unless we implement directly in the source code these relationships using various contexts. It looks like these means we will lose the power of EF6.
The questions we have are:
Is it a bad design maintaining different databases for the same application using EF6?
in case this is a poor design and choosing for a single database, is the performance going to be optimum even driving hundreds of tables (almost 1000) with several TBytes of information?
in the other hand, in the case of opting for the design in which several bbdd appear (it would be much better in our case), what is the best way to handle them EF6?
Thank you very much for your help!
First of all EF is not written to be cross database. You can't write cross database (cross context) queries, lazy load does not work and so on.
This is a big limitation in your case.
EF could work with several schema (actually I don't use it and I don't like it but is just my opinion).
You can use your stored procedures with EF but as I understand you are thinking to stop to use them.
In my experience I wrote several applications with more than one database but the use of the different databases was very limited. In this cases I use cross database views (i.e. one database per company and some common tables with views in company databases that selects data in common tables). In your case, if the tables are sharded everywhere I don't think this is a way you can choose.
So, in my opinion you could change the approach.
If you have backups problems you could shard the huge tables (I think facts tables and tables with pictures) and create cross database views. BTW, also, cross database referential integrity is not supported in SQL Server so you need to write triggers to check it.
If you need to split different application functions (i.e. WMS, CRM and so on) you can use namespaces without bothering about how tables are stored in the DB.

Postgres Multi-tenant administration/maintenance

We have a SaaS application where each tenant has its own database in Postgres. How would I apply a patch to all the databses? For example if I want to add a table or add a column to a table, I have to either write a program that loops through all databases and execute a SQL against them or using pgadmin, go through them one by one.
Is there smarter and/or faster way?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Yes, there's a smarter way.
Don't create a new database for each tenant. If everything is in one database then you only need to alter one database.
Pick one database, alter each table to have the column TENANT and add this to the primary key. Then insert into this database every record for all tenants and drop the other databases (obviously considerably more work than this as your application will need to be changed).
The differences with your approach are extensively discussed elsewhere:
What problems will I get creating a database per customer?
What are the advantages of using a single database for EACH client?
Multiple schemas versus enormous tables
Practicality of multiple databases per client vs one database
Multi-tenancy - single database vs multiple database
If you don't put everything in one database then I'm afraid you have to alter them all individually, and doing it programatically would be simplest.
At a higher level, all multi-tenant applications follow one of three approaches:
One tenant's data lives in one database,
One tenant's data lives in one schema, or
Add a tenant_id / account_id column to your tables (shared schema).
I usually find that developers use the following criteria when they evaluate these different approaches.
Isolation: Since you can put each tenant into its own database in one hand, and have tenants share the same table on the other, this becomes the most apparent dimension. If you provide your users raw SQL access or you're in a regulated industry such as healthcare, you may need strict guarantees from your database. That said, PostgreSQL 9.5 comes with row level security policies that makes this less of a concern for most applications.
Extensibility: If your tenants are sharing the same schema (approach #3), and your tenants have fields that varies between them, then you need to think about how to merge these fields.
This article on multi-tenant databases has a great summary of different approaches. For example, you can add a dozen columns, call them C1, C2, and so forth, and have your application infer the actual data in this column based on the tenant_id. PostgresQL 9.4 comes with JSONB support and natively allows you to use semi-structured fields to express variations between different tenants' data.
Scaling: Another criteria is how easily your database would scale-out. If you create a tenant per database or schema (#1 or #2 above), your application can make use of existing Ruby Gems or [Django packages][1] to simplify app integration. That said, you'll need to manually manage your tenants' data and the machines they live on. Similarly, you'll need to build your own sharding logic to propagate foreign key constraints and ALTER TABLE commands.
With approach #3, you can use existing open source scaling solutions, such as Citus. For example, this blog post describes how to easily shard a multi-tenant app with Postgres.
it's time for me to give back to the community :) So after 4 years, our multi-tenant platform is in production and I would like to share the following observations/experiences with all of you.
We used a database per each tenant. This has given us extreme flexibility as the size of the databases in the backups are not huge and hence we can easily import them into our staging environment for customers issues.
We use Liquibase for database development and upgrades. This has been a tremendous help to us, allowing us to package the entire build into a simple war file. All changes are easily versioned and managed very efficiently. There is a bit of learning curve here an there but nothing substantial. 2-5 days can significantly save you time.
Given that we use Spring/JPA/Hibernate, we use a technique called Dynamic Data Source Routing. So when a user logs-in, we find the related datasource with a lookup and connect them to the session to the right database. That's also when the Liquibase scripts get applied for updates.
This is, for now, I will come back with more later on.
Well, there are problems with one database for all tenants in our case for sure.
The backup file gets huge and becomes almost not practical hard to manage
For troubleshooting, we need to restore customer's data in our dev env, we just use that customer's backup file and usually the file is not as big as if we were to use one database for all customers.
Again, Liquibase has been key in allowing to manage updates across all the tenants seamlessly and without any issues. Without Liquibase, I can see lots of complications with this approach. So Liquibase, Liquibase and more Liquibase.
I also suspect that we would need a more powerful hardware to manage a huge database with large joins across millions of records vs much lighter database with much smaller queries.
In case of problems, the service doesn't go down for everyone and there will be limited to one or few tenants.
In general, for our purposes, this has been a great architectural decision and we are benefiting from it every day. One time we had one customer that didn't have their archiving active and their database size grew to over 3 GB. With offshore teams and slower internet as well as storage/bandwidth prices, one can see how things may become complicated very quickly.
Hope this helps someone.
--Rex

Data Warehousing Postgres

We're considering using SSIS to maintain a PostgreSql data warehouse. I've used it before between SQL Servers with no problems, but am having a lot of difficulty getting it to play nicely with Postgres. I’m using the evaluation version of the OLEDB PGNP data provider (http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.1004).
I wanted to start with something simple like UPSERT on the fact table (10k-15k rows are updated/inserted daily), but this is proving very difficult (not to mention I’ll want to use surrogate keys in the future).
I’ve attempted (Link) and (http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jamiethomson/archive/2006/09/12/SSIS_3A00_-Checking-if-a-row-exists-and-if-it-does_2C00_-has-it-changed.aspx) which are effectively the same (except I don’t really understand the union all at the end when I’m trying to upsert) But I run into the same problem with parameters when doing the update using a OLEDb command – which I tried to overcome using (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141773.aspx) but that just doesn’t seem to work, I get a validation error –
The external columns for complent.... are out of sync with the datasource columns... external column “Param_2” needs to be removed from the external columns.
(this error is repeated for the first two parameters as well – never came across this using the sql connection as it supports named parameters)
Has anyone come across this?
AND:
The fact that this simple task is apparently so difficult to do in SSIS suggests I’m using the wrong tool for the job - is there a better (and still flexible) way of doing this? Or would another ETL package be better for use between two Postgres database? -Other options include any listed on (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load#Open-source_ETL_frameworks). I could just go and write a load of SQL to do this for me, but I wanted a neat and easily maintainable solution.
I have used the Slowly Changing Dimension wizard for this with good success. It may give you what you are looking for especially with the Wizard
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141715.aspx
The External Columns Out Of Sync: SSIS is Case Sensitive - I encountered this issue multiple times and it makes me want to pull my hair out.
This simple task is going to take some work either way. SSIS is by no means an enterprise class ETL product yet, but it does give you some quick and easy functionality, and is sufficient for most ETL work. I guess it is also about your level of comfort with it as well.
SCD is way too slow for what I want. I need to use set based sql.
It turned out that a lot of my problems were with bugs in the provider.
I opened a forum topic (http://www.pgoledb.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=49) and had a useful discussion with the moderator/support/developer person.
Also Postgres doesn't let you do cross db querys, so I solved the problem this way:
Data Source from Production DB to a temp Archive DB table
Run set based query between temp table and archive table
Truncate temp table
Note that the temp table is not atchally a temp table, but a copy of the archive table schema to temporarily stored data in.
Took a while, but I got there in the end.
This simple task is going to take some work either way. SSIS is by no means an enterprise class ETL product yet, but it does give you some quick and easy functionality, and is sufficient for most ETL work. I guess it is also about your level of comfort with it as well.
What enterprise ETL solution would you suggest?