A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Steven Sanderson handles missing information in the best way possible—by ignoring it:
Missing values are a common challenge in data analysis, and R provides robust tools for handling them. The
na.rmparameter is one of R’s most essential features for managing NA values in your data. This comprehensive guide will walk you through everything you need to know about usingna.rmeffectively in your R programming journey.
Read on for several examples of how na.rm works.
Tomaz Kastrun updates a generative AI model:
Fine-tuning is the process of optimizing a pretrained model by training it on your specific dataset, which often contains more examples than you can typically fit in a prompt. Fine-tuning helps you achieve higher quality results for specific tasks, save on token costs with shorter prompts, and improve request latency.
Read on to see how you can do this. Note that you’ll need to set up the fine-tuning data in a particular format for whatever model you’re using.
Leave a CommentIn this video, we will learn how to use Minion Backup to automate backup operations, including setting backup frequency, dynamic backup tuning, and scripting out database restorations.
This video wraps up a series on backup and recovery in SQL Server. Now I have to come up with some new videos.
Leave a CommentRick Dobson encrypts a column:
I was recently assigned to work on a team who will implement column-level encryption and decryption solutions in SQL Server. Please introduce the basics of SQL Server encryption and decryption features. Also, provide a series of T-SQL samples for encrypting and decrypting data within the columns of a SQL Server table.
Always Encrypted can be better for the job, but sometimes, development or product limitations require using old-school column-level (or “cell-level” as people have called it) encryption. And it still works fine for the purpose of encrypting important data at rest.
Leave a CommentKevin Chant threw a spanner in the works this time:
You can find out more about both T-SQL Tuesday and Festive Tech Calendar in my original invitation. Where I invited others to write about a Microsoft Data Platform announcement that they considered to be as amazing as a present. In other words, something which made you go “wow”.
Click through for a variety of responses and Kevin’s categorization of them.
Leave a CommentBrent Ozar is canvassing for survey participants:
Every year, I run a salary survey to help folks have better discussions with their managers about salaries, benefits, and career progression.
The anonymous survey closes Sunday, January 12th. On Tuesday the 14th, I’ll publish the overall responses on the blog in Excel format so you can do slicing & dicing.
Please do fill out the survey. There are enough years of data at this point that we can do some interesting historical trending with it.
Leave a CommentAndy Brownsword goes old-school:
Connecting different versions of SQL Server can allow us to combine or transfer data between environments. This can become a challenge when the versions are really different.
Have you tried to connect SQL Server 2008 to a SQL database in Azure? – it can throw up a few curve balls.
In this post we’ll look at how to solve 3 of the issues you might come up against.
When reading the title, my first response was, “But why not use PolyBase?” Then Andy threw the SQL Server 2008 bit at me, and then my response was, “But why not use a product that isn’t nearly old enough to vote?”
Nonetheless, Andy does a great job of demonstrating how this would work, and it can work for later versions of SQL Server as well.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck turns his head just slightly:
Since the days of Analysis Services Multidimensional, we could create perspectives on our cubes. A perspective provides the opportunity to show only a selection of items (facts, dimensions, or measures) to a user. In Analysis Services Tabular, the same functionality is also available, and it helps to make complex models more digestible for end users. Right now, we have a big model in Power BI that covers different domains of our organization. We would like to create perspectives too, but is this even possible in Power BI?
Click through for the answer, as well as an important note that perspectives are for usability, not security.
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