A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Volker Bachmann has a script for us:
I will publish short PowerShell scripts with dbatools in loose order that will help with simple tasks or checks on multiple systems.
I would like to start with a script that lists hard drives that have less than a certain percentage of free space left, here 10%.
These are summarized in an email and sent as a list.
Click through for the script, as well as quick German and English explanations.
Comments closedDimitri Furman fills us in on recent happenings:
To better support Extended Events in Azure SQL, in recent months we have made several improvements. Now, you can:
- View event data in SSMS without downloading xel files from Azure Storage
- Watch live data for an event session
- Use the XEvent Profiler
- Use the histogram target
- Monitor Extended Events performance
- Use granular Extended Events permissions
Much of this is already available in the box product. Dimitri also notes some performance improvements and other updates as well.
Comments closedGrant Fritchey answers a question:
A great question came up over at DBA.StackExchange regarding the query store reports time intervals:
How can SQL Server’s Query Store Reports show data for minute-length intervals, when “Statistics Collection Interval” is set to 1 hour?
Read on for the answer to this question.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck shows us a convenient action you can perform in Microsoft Fabric pipelines:
A while ago I had a little blog post series about cool stuff in Snowflake. I’m doing a similar series now, but this time for Microsoft Fabric. I’m not going to cover the basic of Fabric, hundreds of bloggers have already done that. I’m going to cover little bits & pieces that I find interesting, that are similar to Snowflake features or something that is an improvement over the “regular” SQL Server or related products.
In this blog post I’m highlighting the fact we can now deactivate activities in a pipeline
Read on to see how you can do this and what the implications of the action are.
Comments closedChris Webb puts on the lab coat and safety glasses:
Excel workbooks are one of the slowest data sources you can use with Power Query in Excel or Power BI. Reading small amounts of data from small workbooks is usually fast; reading large amounts of data from large workbooks can be very slow. But what about reading small amounts of data from large Excel workbooks? I did some tests and it turns out that performance can vary a lot depending on where your data is in the workbook and how that workbook is structured.
Read on for some interesting findings.
Comments closedMichael Mayer lays some groundwork:
SHAP is the predominant way to interpret black-box ML models, especially for tree-based models with the blazingly fast TreeSHAP algorithm.
For general models, two slower SHAP algorithms exist:
- Permutation SHAP (Štrumbelj and Kononenko, 2010)
- Kernel SHAP (Lundberg and Lee, 2017)
Read on to understand more about these two forms of SHAP, as well as how they compare in two datasets of differing levels of difficulty.
Comments closedDaniel Calbimonte adds a new user two separate ways:
Open PGAdmin and connect to the server where you want to create the new user.
In the Object Browser, expand the Server and go to Login/Group Roles tree, and right-click on the folder. Select Create>Login/Group Role option from the context menu.
In addition to adding a user via PGAdmin, there’s also a script to add users via pgSQL, and that will look a lot more familiar to SQL Server administrators.
Comments closedReitse Eskens phones a friend:
In my previous blogpost (Click here to read) I wrote about a query that just wouldn’t go parallel. This sparked some discussion and interest from a few people who were very kind and helpful with their suggestions and even deep dives into the query plans, execution statistics etc.
To make one thing very clear, this blog is 99% their work, only the typing and rephrasing is mine. This also means that mistakes are mine as I’m trying to join the different inputs together into a logical story. So let me introduce you to the heroes, order by first name ascending.
Read on to see what people suggested and the effect that had.
Comments closedPaul White unravels a mystery:
Batch mode sorting was added to SQL Server in the 2016 release under compatibility level 130. Most of the time, a batch mode sort will be much faster than the row mode equivalent.
This post is about an important exception to this rule, as recently reported by Erik Darling (video).
No doubt you’ll visit both links before reading on, but to summarize, the issue is that batch mode sorts are very slow when they spill—much slower than an equivalent row mode sort.
Read the whole thing. Paul does a great job illuminating us.
Comments closedOn the surface, when comparing Power BI vs Tableau, they appear very similar. Both are business intelligence tools. Both create slick dashboards and offer more than one data visualization tool. In fact, most people can’t distinguish between a dashboard created in Tableau and one created in Power BI.
Each of them has its strengths. However, their core difference lies in their approach to data integration, transformation, and analysis. Now, let’s break this down.
Read on for Rob’s take on the matter.
Comments closed