A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kevin Hill provides advice for the non-DBA:
It’s a vague but common complaint, frequently with no additional details. Before blindly restarting SQL Server, let’s walk through quick checks that don’t require deep DBA skills.
This should all be easy for a DBA but for a company lacking a DBA, it’s a good starting point for troubleshooting.
Comments closedDave Stokes runs two commands:
PostgreSQL is equivalent to a Swiss Army Knife in the database world. There are things in PostgreSQL that are very simple to use, while in another database, they take many more steps to accomplish. But sometimes, the knife has too many blades, which can cause confusion. This is one of those cases.
Read on to understand what the difference is between these two commands.
Comments closedDeborah Melkin casts a wide net:
There were a lot of themes that I noticed throughout everyone’s posts. First were the number of people who mentioned that mentoring doesn’t have to be formal or even a 1:1 relationship. Mentoring isn’t just for adults and careers, but for the next generation too. Mentoring has helped their careers or become part of a core tenant in their company and how they run their business. It’s a place to grow our community, and not just for those who look like us. We all talked about how we have grown from mentoring, not just as mentees but as mentors.
Click through for a dozen-and-a-half responses to the T-SQL Tuesday call.
Comments closedCraig Kerstiens covers a misunderstood extension:
Citus is in a small class of the most advanced Postgres extensions that exist. While there are many Postgres extensions out there, few have as many hooks into Postgres or change the storage and query behavior in such a dramatic way. Most that come to Citus have very wrong assumptions. Citus turns Postgres into a sharded, distributed, horizontally scalable database (that’s a mouthful), but it does so for very specific purposes.
Read on to learn when Citus can work well, when it isn’t a good fit, and a few architecture and design recommendations around using the extension.
Comments closedKrishnakumar Rukmangathan makes a copy:
Copy Job has been a go-to tool for simplified data ingestion in Microsoft Fabric, offering a seamless data movement experience from any source to any destination. Whether you need batch or incremental copying, it provides the flexibility to meet diverse data needs while maintaining a simple and intuitive workflow.
We continuously refine Copy Job based on customer feedback, enhancing both functionality and user experience. In this update, we’re introducing three key UX improvements designed to streamline your workflow and boost efficiency.
Read on for those three improvements.
Comments closedJosephine Bush busts out a linter:
I thought I didn’t care about linting, and lately, I haven’t written a lot of SQL, but for the SQL I do write, I have SQLFluff to help me format it. A friend of mine is big into SQLFluff and finally talked me into installing and using it. For more information about SQLFluff itself, visit here.
Josephine shows off some of the configuration for PostgreSQL’s psql as well as SQL Server’s T-SQL.
Comments closedMika Sutinen explains some of the nuance around Azure availability zones:
Azure Availability Zones help provide resiliency to your database services within an Azure Region. I simply love it how simple Microsoft has made building geographically dispersed database services. If you’ve ever designed and deployed multi-site, highly available database services in on-premises, you know what I am talking about.However, with the Availability Zones in Azure, there are a couple of things to know. I’ve learned my lessons the hard way, so in this post I am providing some tools and guidance on how to avoid some pitfalls when building multi-zone database services.
Click through for that guidance.
Comments closedJared Westover looks at key constraints:
In late 2024, I noticed a comment on the Microsoft Learn site stating that foreign keys could improve query performance on tables in a Fabric warehouse. That claim immediately caught my attention. I wanted to answer a simple question: Do relationships help, hurt, or have no effect when added to tables in a Fabric warehouse?
Let’s get more specific—do foreign keys improve query performance when reading data (not loading)? In other words, do they make queries run faster?
Sadly, the answer is not as promising as with SQL Server. But this also makes sense considering the distributed nature of Fabric data warehouses.
Comments closedTobias McNulty now has two problems:
regexp_matches()andregexp_match()are two similar string functions that support regular expression matching directly in the PostgreSQL database.regexp_matches()was added in PostgreSQL 8.3, andregexp_match()was added in PostgreSQL 10 (keep reading to see how ChatGPT struggled to answer this question).
Read on for that as well as plenty more information on how the two work, and even a bonus snippet on another regular expression function.
Comments closedMatthew Hicks isn’t replicating data anymore:
Microsoft OneLake is the single, unified, logical data lake that allows your entire organization to store, manage, and analyze data in one place. It provides seamless integration with various data sources and engines, making it easier to derive insights and drive innovation.
At the most recent Microsoft Build conference, we announced the integration effort between Snowflake and OneLake, which aims to allow users of both Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric to work on the same Iceberg data in OneLake, with no data duplication/movement needed. More recently, we released the preview of OneLake’s Iceberg table format support, which included the ability for Snowflake to write Iceberg tables directly to OneLake.
Click through for more information about the current status of this feature, as well as what’s coming soon.
Comments closed