This month’s invitation from Marlon is sure to bring out the war stories as he asks us to share our most memorable SQL Server outage. I enjoy a good war story. But no, this isn’t the time Azure blindsided me, when service accounts were locked, or when I left a transaction open and halted a production system (easily fixed […]
I’ve spent years shaping data with SQL Server, however after pulling at the threads of Fabric I’m opening notebooks and finding PySpark. At first glance the difference is stark, but it’s not quite the dramatic shift it appears. If you’re not familiar, let’s look at what’s very similar, and where the true differences are. Same data, different […]
I’ve had Fabric gnawing at me for too long. Whilst I’ve dabbled in a couple of areas, I haven’t taken the time to explore the breadth of what Microsoft’s flagship data platform offers. That is, until I recently took the plunge. For those who may be in the same position, I wanted to share the […]
Date handling in SQL Server tends to accumulate tried and trusted combinations of DATEPART(), DATEADD(), and DATEDIFF() – with nested variations. The challenge with these isn’t raw performance, but more with conveying intent and readability. So let’s look at some simpler patterns to try and avoid some of these and be clearer with what we’re […]
For August’s T-SQL Tuesday ask, Jeff has thrown temp tables to the wolves. Does the community like or loathe their usage? I’ll predict a few ‘it depends’ responses, and I lean towards Jeff’s position that they’re more of the exception than the rule. I’d argue there’s one particular scenario where this exception becomes exceptional (heh). Building optimisation boundaries […]
Computed columns allow us to bake logic into our schema. I find particular use for these when reviewing or optimising established solutions where you spot the quirky ways the data is being used. Here I want to demonstrate 3 symptoms and show how different implementations of computed columns solve them. Baking the expression Common expressions […]
Fragmented data estates usually share a trait – there’s no consistent representation of core business entities. It’s a common thread I’ve seen – system-centric entities and attributes, then another solution which recreates these in its own unique way. Different systems talking different languages make integrations messy and bespoke. It’s a technical mess, and it doesn’t […]
When developing Power BI models, we don’t always want to refresh the entire dataset before we start working with the data. We can speed up the refresh – and therefore our development – by reducing the volume we’re working with. Here we’ll look at a couple of ways to use parameters to adapt production-ready models to reduce […]
Schema drift is an inevitable part of environments where database changes are applied manually. Sometimes it’s dev-ing in production, other times it’s lax change control. Either way you’ve got a problem, and SSDT comparisons may be the solution. In this post I want to look at how using the Schema Compare and Data Compare features […]
For the bicentennial edition of T-SQL Tuesday, Brent has thrown down the topic of “When I’m looking at a query, I bet it’s bad if I see ____.”. I’m expecting the Brits out in force for this game of Blankety Blank. There are some things which terrify me when troubleshooting: Not necessarily in that order. But there’s […]
Andy Brownsword 