A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Sebastiao Pereira approximates an integral in T-SQL:
The Newton-Cotes formulas are a useful and straightforward family of numerical integration, which is the approximate computation of an integral using numerical techniques. The numerical computation of an integral is also called quadrature. How can we build these formulas in SQL Server without using external tools?
Click through to see how it all works.
Leave a CommentDeborah Melkin takes a look at the state of notebooks in the Microsoft ecosystem:
Azure Data Studio, as some of you know, has now been deprecated. That came out a while ago and the official deprecation was, I think, a couple months ago at this point. It’s all a blur, but needless to say, no more Azure Data Studio. I had gotten an email from someone who said they saw my presentation and they’d love to see more about it, especially with VS Code. Because there was an extension in VS Code for notebooks, and particularly something called .NET Interactive, which are polyglot notebooks, polyglot multi-language. All right, that was really cool and I had started addressing that, too, because it had just been introduced. It’s a really cool concept.
And then before I had a chance to put it together, new notice from Microsoft. Guess what’s being deprecated?
You guessed it. .NET Interactive notebooks. They went bye-bye. Great.
But wait, I hear SQL Notebook’s theme music?
Leave a CommentUser Defined Functions (UDFs) are, in my opinion, the biggest update to Power BI Desktop since PBIP.
That may sound dramatic, but if you care about DataOps, semantic model quality, and reusable development patterns, UDFs fundamentally change what is possible with DAX.
Reuse is one of the core principles of DataOps. For years we have been able to build reusable patterns in Power Query, PowerShell, Python, YAML, and infrastructure automation. But DAX was always missing a key capability: reusable logic that could live inside the semantic model itself.
Until now.
Read on to learn more, as well as to get a link to John’s PQL.Assert DAX unit testing library.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck wraps up another T-SQL Tuesday:
A good week ago I hosted the monthly T-SQL Tuesday blog party. I invited the community the blog about the idea of what would happen if we would need to go back on-premises, after a good decade of cloud computing. What would you need to do? How do you plan for this? What are the skills you might need to (re-)learn? You can find my take on this here, where I’m telling my junior colleagues that troubleshooting issues on-prem is more challenging, because it’s possible you need to go way down, all the way to Kerberos, SAN and DNS issues.
Click through for the contributions.
Leave a CommentTim Radney proffers some advice:
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen the same patterns repeat: nightly index maintenance jobs running for hours, consuming massive CPU and I/O, only for performance to remain inconsistent or even degrade in some cases. Many of us (myself included, early in my career) relied heavily on avg_fragmentation_in_percent from sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats to decide when to reorganize or rebuild indexes. It’s time we move past that outdated approach and stop just doing what we’ve always done.
One thing I would add on to Tim’s advice is, determine whether that index even needs rebuilt or if you’re burning resources for no practical benefit. If there’s no practical performance benefit from the operation—and with all-flash arrays that are within an order of magnitude of RAM speeds, you might already be close to that point—then the index rebuild is for naught. The index maintenance strategy that we all learned back in the day was to minimize the time we spent waiting for spinning disks to reach relevant data. When random access lookups are approximately the same speed as sequential lookups, position on the disk doesn’t matter all that much.
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