A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Steve Jones rustles up the herd:
I hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday party with my invitation asking about tracking permissions. I didn’t get my own post completed in time, but I’ll add it in the next week sometimes.
In any case, here’s a roundup of the posts I saw. If I missed any, ping me and I’ll add you.
Click through for the full list of respondents.
Leave a CommentIn this video, we will take a look at several useful KPIs for measuring customer growth. We will also demonstrate the utility of DATETRUNC(), calendar tables, and the LAG() and LEAD() window functions.
The calendar table (or date dimension) interlude may seem a little bit weird at first, but I firmly believe that calendar tables absolutely belong on basically every SQL Server instance, even if only in a utility database.
Leave a CommentGrant Fritchey announces a product:
I’ve been putting together a new PostgreSQL session called “Performance Monitoring for the Absolute Beginner.” There are several ways to get an understanding of how well your queries are running in PostgreSQL, but, frankly, all of them are a bit of a pain to someone coming from the land of Extended Events (ah, my one true love). Because of this, I saw it as an opportunity to help those just getting going in PostgreSQL. I’ll be presenting it for the first time at Postgres Conference in Orlando on March 19, 2025. Come on by.
Anyhoo, wouldn’t it be nice to maybe have a shortcut, an easier way to look at this information?
Well, there is. Redgate has been working on a completely free tool for leveraging just this sort of data called pgNow. Go here to check it out yourself, but I’ll do a quick run through here.
Click through to see how it works.
Leave a CommentChris Webb gives us the scoop:
There’s a new M function rolling out now that allows you to read metadata from Delta tables (at the time of writing it’s available in Dataflows Gen2 and will be available soon in Desktop). It builds on the DeltaLake.Table M function that allows you to read data from Delta tables and is similar to the Parquet.Metadata function that was released last year.
Click through for an example of how to use it against a Delta table in OneLake.
Leave a CommentMarc Lelijveld asks, what’s in a name?
In Fabric, you can have many different items in your Workspace. So many, that you easily get lost! Luckily there are tools at hand like Taskflows and Workspace folders. But still, it can be challenging to easily find all your items that ingest data, or find all items that are used for inbetween layers to transform data.
In this blog, I will tell you more about my personal best practice for naming convention of Fabric items that helps me to structure everything in my workspace.
This kind of thing typically doesn’t matter much when you only have a dozen or so items in your workspace. But as that number increases and different teams are working on different sets of items, it gets harder to figure out what’s going on without a proper naming convention.
Leave a CommentPatrick Gruenauer looks for what’s missing:
We are often looking for attributes, but what about the empty attributes? How can I find out if an attribute is empty? That is the focus of this article. I will show a practical example of how to find these empty attributes.
Let’s start with how to find attributes which are NOT empty. The following code retrieves all svchost process Attributes which have a value.
Read on for the pipeline to see which attributes have a value, followed by a similar pipeline to find missing values, as well as one practical use case for why you might use this.
Leave a CommentJosephine Bush changes server type:
This is more complicated than using the Azure Migration method, but because it’s maxed out on resources for the last week in the east regions (and possibly central), and who knows when they will fix it, I had to resort to other methods. I’m getting on flex sooner than later. I want to get this over with and get to those performance improvements and better features. I will preface this all by saying, if you have big databases, this may not be the right path for you. Look into streaming replication or wait for Microsoft to fix their migration tool and do an online migration via that. Also, if you don’t have strong Postgres skills, this is far more complicated than the migration tool in Azure, far more complicated.
Click through for the step-by-step instructions.
Leave a CommentReza Rad does a bit of configuration:
Aggregation can speed up the performance of DirectQuery sourced tables significantly. To use it, firstly, you need to create an aggregation table. Secondly, you must set up proper storage modes for tables in the model. Finally, you have to configure the aggregation functions, which I will explain in this post. You can learn about aggregation in other posts of this series and continue the example here. If you like to learn more about Power BI, read the Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.
Read on to learn more.
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