A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
In Snowflake, there is another function that is SOUNDEX-like that can give slightly different results – SOUNDEX_P123.
For those cases where the first and second letters of the string have the same SOUNDEX number, the SOUNDEX_P123 function will keep the number for the second letter. This variant is used in a few other database systems, for example, Teradata.
Click through for a demonstration of the two SOUNDEX() variants and how results can differ.
Brendan Tierney looks at the data:
Getting back to the topic of this post, I’ve gathered some data and obtained some league tables from some sites. These will help to have a closer look at what is really happening in the Database market throughout 2022. Two popular sites who constantly monitor the wider internet and judge how popular Databases area globally. These sites are DB-Engines and TOPDB Top Database index. These are well know and are frequently cited. Both of these sites give some details of how they calculate their scores, with one focused mainly on how common the Database appears in searches across different search engines, while the other one, in addition to search engine results/searches, also looks across different websites, discussion forms, social media, job vacancies, etc.
I don’t necessarily believe that these are totally accurate, though on the whole, I do expect the results to be directionally accurate. I’ve used DB-Engines data several times in the past and like to point out that, for any given year, 7 or 8 of the top 10 database engines are relational.
Comments closedDeborah Melkin riddles us this on dynamic SQL:
I admit it – I do waaayyyy too much with dynamic SQL. But I just keep running into situations that require it. That being said, I ran into an interesting problem that had me puzzled. I found a bunch of different blog posts that pointed to me to the right direction but required a little extra work to find the solution.
There are several concepts that are at play here, so I’ll try to break this out so we can put the pieces together. The first once is centered around dynamic SQL. There are two parts of this I want to make sure we understand first – how it fits into sessions and how it gets executed.
Read the whole thing.
Comments closedMatthew McGiffen helps us recover from a big oopsie:
If you don’t have the backups of the certificate and private key from the old server, as well as the password used to encrypt the private key backup then you could be in a lot of trouble. There is one scenario where you have a way out. I’m going to assume you don’t have the possibility to recover your old server from a complete file system backup – if you do then you can do that and access all the keys you require. If the two following things are true though then you can still recover your database:
Read on to see what those requirements are and how you can, in specific circumstances, recover that database.
Comments closedLindsay Clark covers an upcoming licensing change:
Industry experts have pointed out that businesses with limited Java use would have to license the software per employee under the new model, a dramatic shift from the one Oracle previously afforded them.
This week, Big Red – which acquired Java with its buyout of Sun Microsystems in 2009 – said the new Java SE Universal Subscription is “a simple, low-cost monthly subscription that includes Java SE Licensing and Support for use on Desktops, Servers or Cloud deployments.”
Seems like as good a reason as any to kick the Java habit.
Comments closedBen Miller begins a series on Ola Hallengren’s maintenance solution:
I recommended creating a database to use for this solution or even installing it into an existing DBA function database. I usually create a DBA database and use it for this purpose and others as well. With this new database, you configure the Database in the header of the maintenance solution SQL file, whether to create jobs, retention time and backup directory for the jobs.
This first post acts as a primer for those who might have the solution but haven’t investigated it in any detail.
Comments closedKeeping your R code organised is not as straightforward as one might think. Just think about the libraries, variables, functions, and many more. All these objects can be defined and later rewritten, some might get obsolete during the process.
This process is proven to be even more crucial when you are part of a larger group of engineers, and scientists, who collaborate with you.
Click through for some organizational tips specific to R code.
Comments closedThe
maxandminaggregation functions are common to almost every language, and the Kusto Query Language is no exception. As you would think, when you pipe in a datasetmaxreturns the maximum value for the column name you pass in. Likewiseminreturns the lowest value.In addition, there are variants for each,
maxifandminif. We’ll see examples for all of these in this post.
Click through for a few functions you can call via the summarize operator.
Matthew McGiffen notes how to restore a database with transparent data encryption:
When encrypting a database with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), a vital consideration is to make sure we are prepared for the scenario where something goes wrong. For instance, if the server hosting our SQL instance goes belly-up, can we recover the data that we have encrypted with TDE?
Click through to learn what you’ll need to have.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck hits a concatenation issue:
I was writing some dynamic SQL that generates some SQL statements to load my facts and dimensions into a data warehouse. Some of those SQL statements can become very long, for example if a dimension has a lot of columns. When debugging, I noticed a couple of statements failing with various errors. Turns out, they were truncated after 4000 characters. What was going on?
Read on to see what happened.
Comments closed