A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Harshavardhan Yedla gives us some guidance:
Optimizing a Snowflake data warehouse (DWH) is crucial for ensuring high performance, cost-efficiency, and long-term effectiveness in data processing and analytics. The following outlines the key reasons optimization is essential:
Read on for some tips around optimizing Snowflake warehouses. A lot of this stays at a pretty high level and doesn’t provide detailed guidance, but it’s a good checklist for thinking about your own situation.
Leave a CommentReza Rad is leading this interrogation:
There are many DAX functions for covering day-to-day business-related calculations using measures and calculated columns. However, there is also a set of functions that can be helpful to the BI team and developers in gaining insights from the Power BI model itself. The insights can include things such as the number of both-directional relationships, the dependency of the calculations, the list of columns in tables, etc. These functions are in the category of INFO functions in DAX. Let’s see what they are and how they work.
Click through for a list, as well as how you can make use of them.
Leave a CommentAncy Philip makes an announcement:
We’re excited to announce that the long-awaited refresh SQL analytics endpoint metadata REST API is now available in preview. You can now programmatically trigger a refresh of your SQL analytics endpoint to keep tables in sync with any changes made in the parent artifact, ensuring that you can keep your data up to date as needed.
Click through to see how it works.
Leave a CommentStephen Planck does some testing:
Regularly restoring test copies of your databases is the gold-standard proof that your backups work. Between those tests, however, RESTORE VERIFYONLY offers a fast way to confirm that a backup file is readable, that its page checksums are valid, and that the media set is complete. In this post you will see how to run that command from PowerShell by invoking SQL Server Management Objects (SMO), turning a one-off verification into a repeatable step you can schedule across all your servers.
Click through for the script and explanation. I also like dbatools’ Test-DbaLastBackup command, as that can also run RESTORE VERIFYONLY but goes further and allows you to restore the backup and then run DBCC CHECKDB against its contents.
Kevin Hill satisfies Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:
Too many IT teams treat SQL Server Agent jobs like a coffee timer “Set it and forget it!”
Unfortunately, that mindset only works if everything else is perfect forever. Whether its backup jobs failing silently, index maintenance running on the wrong replica, or nobody getting alerts when things break, unattended SQL Agent jobs are one of the sneakiest ways to rack up technical debt. Let’s dig into what DBAs and non-DBAs alike need to keep an eye on to avoid job-related headaches.
Kevin includes some good tips on monitoring SQL Agent jobs. If you’re feeling paranoid or have a particularly important job to watch, it may also make sense to set up some monitoring alerts around the end results, tracking things like the latest load date (for an ETL job) or some other indicator of doneness, and have a monitoring solution independently verify this.
Leave a CommentElena Drakulevska explains why padding is so important between visuals in Power BI reports:
Now that we’ve all learned to love rounded corners, let’s talk about another quiet champion of good design: padding.
You know, that tiny bit of space inside your visuals that keeps content from being awkwardly pressed right up against the border, with no room to breathe. Yeah. That.
The ideal here is to have densely informative visuals that have sufficient padding to make it easy for a viewer to move between them.
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