Here’s my participation in this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. T-what you say? T-SQL Tuesday, the monthly blog party started by Adam Machanic! Head over here to this month’s invitation by Rick Krueger: T-SQL Tuesday #46 Rube Goldberg Machine for the longer story.
So, a story about SQL Server-related contraptions, let’s see… Yeah, I can do that!
Some years ago I was asked to help out in finding a solution to a certain problem, the life of a consultant, right? The problem was performance related. No, this is not a story about a database without any indexes. Instead, it involves a certain .NET web application. The end user would fill out a page with some metrics and the application would then perform certain calculations. And that’s where we get to the issue: the calculations would take way too many minutes (yes, not seconds, minutes!) to finish. That was the challenge.
The first step was to examine the .NET code that was performing those calculations. But there were so many lines of code, complicated code, that the final conclusion was: hmm, rewriting this contraption is not an option right now…
After some discussion with the project lead it became clear that the end user would not necessarily need to wait for the calculation to finish. It didn’t need to get calculated online. Aha! So if we would be able to schedule these calculations and set up a batch process then that means problem solved, right? Now, how would we schedule this? How about our favorite scheduler, the SQL Server Agent? Yes, that’s it!
So I ended up building an assembly that was to be called from SQL Server: a CLR-enabled assembly! The web application used web services so the new assembly would also call a couple of (reworked) "calculate" methods. This meant we had to install the assembly with increased permissions: EXTERNAL_ACCESS to be precise.
Furthermore I didn’t want to hardcode the path to the web service. There were different environments, you know, DEV, UAT, PRD, so it had to be configurable. Now, as the assembly is getting called from SQL Server, I needed to provide the configuration through sqlservr.exe.config which gets loaded when SQL Server starts.
As you can probably guess, this little project required a lot of investigation, trial and error, and so on. But I learned a lot from it and that’s what I like! And it also made me write the following article: Calling A Web Service From SQL Server 2005.
This article turned out to be quite popular, even today, almost five years later, it’s still in my top 10 most viewed pages of last month!
Was this a clean solution? Well no, otherwise I wouldn’t have selected it for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday party, right?
Did it solve the issue? It sure did!
‘till next time and in the meantime: have fun!
Valentino.
