A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Dan Liu makes an announcement:
Task flows feature is now generally available! Task flows streamline the design of your data solutions and ensure consistency between design and development efforts. It also allows you to navigate items and manage your workspace more easily, even as it becomes more complex over time.
Read on to see what’s available to us now.
Comments closedIn general, the process to build and manage both models and reports in Power BI can be simplified to a few sequential steps that describe the “lifecycle” of this content. You can see this depicted below, as well as some examples of the various tools that you might use to support each of these steps. Shameless plug, Bravo, Vertipaq Analyzer, and Analyze in Excel were created by SQLBI, and SQLBI is involved in the development of DAX Studio, DAX Optimizer, and Tabular Editor.
Click through for an interesting table showing what fits where. If all you’re using is Power BI Desktop, there’s a whole world of additional functionality you’re missing out on.
Comments closedDavid Fitzjarrell wants to see which indexes are in use:
Database performance is one of the biggest areas for DBAs to address, measured primarily in time. Users usually complain when queries “take too long” and immediately run to the DBA team to register their disappointment. One avenue used to address such concerns is the creation and maintenance of indexes, and as any DBA with any experience can attest, simply throwing indexes at a table isn’t necessarily the smartest play; a major concern is if the index is actually being utilized. Oracle, in its wisdom, has provided tools to monitor these objects in the form of system views. Let’s look at what is available and how to get the most benefit out of them.
Click through for some scripts and information on how to tell whether an index is in use or not.
Comments closedVlad Drumea counts that which does not exist:
I’ve seen variations of the question “how to count all NULLs in all columns of a table” pop up on reddit once every couple of months, and I figured I’d give it a shot and post here in case anyone else might need it in the future.
Click through for the script. It does require M*N scans, where M represents the average number of columns in each table and N the number of tables in the database. In other words, don’t expect an immediate response.
Comments closedPatrick Gruenauer asks, what’s in a name?:
Active Directory users log on with their logon names and password. But what are the rules for assigning usernames? g.surname? surname? gsurname? What are the naming conventions? This article looks for and modifies users who do not meet the naming convention.
Read on to see how it works.
Comments closedYohann Mansiaux steps through the code:
We are going to see how to use these functions in VSCode, as well as introducing “breakpoints”. Breakpoints are markers that you can set in your code to pause execution at a specific line. This allows you to inspect the state of your code at that point and step through it line by line. They are very close to the
browser()function. They can also be used in RStudio IDE, but I have to admit that I never used them.
Read on to see how VSCode fills the need when it comes to debugging code. H/T R-Bloggers.
Comments closedSean Falconer builds an orchestration engine:
Just as some problems are too big for one person to solve, some tasks are too complex for a single artificial intelligence (AI) agent to handle. Instead, the best approach is to decompose problems into smaller, specialized units so that multiple agents can work together as a team.
This is the foundation of a multi-agent system—networks of agents, each with a specific role, collaborating to solve larger problems.
Read on for the overview. There’s also a code repository and a free e-book on the topic.
Comments closedShayon Mukherjee continues pulling on a thread:
A few days ago, I wrote about a surprising planner behavior with CTEs, DELETE, and LIMIT in PostgreSQL, a piece I hastily put together on a bus ride. That post clearly only scratched the surface of a deeper issue that I’ve since spent way too many hours exploring. So here are some more formed thoughts and findings.
Click through for a deeper dive into the topic, including some key takeaways.
Comments closedAditya Jain announces a preview:
Azure Key Vault support in Fabric Data connections is now in preview! With this capability, we are introducing a new concept called ‘Azure Key Vault references’ in Microsoft Fabric, using which, users can reuse their existing Azure key vault secrets for authentication to data source connections instead of copy-pasting passwords, slashing credential-management effort and audit risk.
Click through to see what works so far and the current limitations.
Comments closedErik Darling announces a tool.
If you’ve given Erik money in the past (which I can confirm is an easy enough task). If you’ve used sp_WhoIsActive to write to a table, you’ve got an idea of how it will work. But this looks quite a bit easier than setting it all up yourself.
And the next time you run into Josh Darnell, say thank you.
Comments closed