A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Tomaz Kastrun gives us his John Hancock:
Given two random vectors, you can generate a plot that, xspline will smooth out the plot and give it a “signaturey” look.
The function itself is straightforward:
They’re just about enough to look like a scribbled signature.
Comments closedRyan Booz shares a few bits of advice about people learning about Postgres:
I was much further in my SQL Server career than I should have been before I understood the usefulness of
APPLYin T-SQL. I didn’t realize thatAPPLYisn’t a SQL standard and so when I started using PostgreSQL and needed similar functionality, I was perplexed trying to find the equivalent. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one searching.
My recollection here is that Microsoft introduced the APPLY operator before there was an ANSI standard, so as long as my memory isn’t faulty here, this wasn’t a case of a vendor just deciding to name something differently for the sake of it.
Regardless, Ryan has a lot of good advice for learners of PL/SQL.
Comments closedSean Gallardy answers a question:
I see many questions, and have been on the receiving end of many myself, about out of support items and removing them from their SQL Server servers. One of these items is the SQL Server Native Client, aka SNAC, aka SQLNCLI, and I’m sure many others. I remember investigating the connections a very long time ago when availability groups first came around (2012) and haven’t looked at it since that time. A question on the database administrators stack exchange asked the question about if SNAC could be removed on a SQL Server 2019 instance used in high availability and my gut reaction was, “nope.” Gut reactions are great but not always correct, so I did a little testing.
Click through for the results of Sean’s testing.
Comments closedRui Cunha announces an update to SqlPackage.exe:
SqlPackage release 161.8089.0, dated February 13, 2023, brings a new feature: support for Synapse serverless SQL pools. According to the release notes, you can use SqlPackage to extract and publish both external and internal objects from serverless SQL pools. This includes the T-SQL surface area of serverless SQL pools is limited by design to external tables, external views, stored procedures, functions, statistics, and credentials.
The following features are included in support for serverless SQL pools:
- delta external file format
- openrowset provider CosmosDB with PROVIDER, CONNECTION, OBJECT, and CREDENTIAL or SERVER_CREDENTIAL specified
- openrowset format SStream
with ()clause on openrowset
Rui also includes a quick demonstration of this new functionality.
Comments closedChris Webb provides advice about a relatively new feature:
In the blog post for the October 2022 release of Power BI Desktop there’s a brief description of a new optimisation in Power BI for filters that perform searches in text columns. In this blog post I’m going to share more details about this optimisation and how you can make sure your reports can benefit from it.
Read on to learn a bit more about how it works, as well as a few tips on ensuring that you’re able to take full advantage of this optimization.
Comments closedAndreas Scherbaum shows off two internal psql commands:
My preferred client for PostgreSQL is psql, and while it is very powerful I like a few features a most:
- \timing
- \watch
Both are internal commands in psql, \timing is there for a very long time, but got improved at some point. \watch came later, but is also there for a couple years now.
Read on to see what these two commands can do.
Comments closed