A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Bill Fellows runs into an issue:
Perfect, now I have a row for each second from midnight to approximately 5.5 hours later. What if my duration need to vary because I’m going to compute these ranges for a number of different scenarios? I should make that 19565 into a variable and let’s overengineer this by making it a bigint.
Things don’t work out quite the way you might have expected there. Read on and see what Bill found and how you can circumvent the problem.
Comments closedI am often asked about all kinds of various errors, of course with absolutely no context. I also get asked what error X is or means or says… I don’t remember that stuff off the top of my head. The thing is, you kind of need SQL Server to go look it up and there have been a plethora of times when this wasn’t possible. I’ve also noticed that people tend to give you just the error number and not anything else.
Read on to learn more about what Sean has created, akin to the SQLskills wait stats compendium.
Comments closedOlivier Van Steenlandt continues a series on database projects:
In a previous blog post (Database Projects – Merging changes), we successfully merged our feature branch into our development branch. Now, as a final step in our development process, we want to get our changes deployed to our development environment.
In this blog post, we will go through the process step by step to execute a manual deployment. We will take a look at what happens behind the scenes, how deployment works and we also will take a look at Publishing Profiles.
Check out that process.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld wants to see what’s out there in the wild:
In some scenarios, it can happen that you do not even have a Power BI desktop data model. For example, when you migrated from Analysis Services to Power BI Premium, or in case you have to deal with large datasets and it is directly developed using Visual Studio, Tabular Editor or any other tool of your preference and deployed over the XMLA endpoint. Similar setup could be that you once enriched your data model using Tabular Editor or ALM Toolkit, which resulted in the fact that your Power BI Desktop file, is no longer your golden version of your data model.
Another scenario could be gaining an overview of partitioning when using incremental refresh. The partitions of Incremental Refresh are only generated in the Power BI Service. So, including this information in your generated documentation is only possible when you connect directly to the Power BI Service.
But what if you still want to show a complete view of your Power BI data model, and extract insights using the Power BI Model Documenter? I can tell you; it is possible!
Read on to see what you can do in that case.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers tries it:
Did you know that there is an easy way to run and extract Power BI REST API data?
The good news is that you can do this directly in your web browser. You don’t have to install or configure anything!
The method below works well if you want to either test the API to see what it returns.
Or if you want to run it to extract some data.
Read on for the process.
Comments closedBenjamin Smith’s ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to his newsletter:
Jinja is a powerful templating engine that is useful in a variety of contexts. Recently, I discovered how its possible to use the power of Jinja syntax in R with the
jinjarpackage written by David C Hall. Withjinjarand thetidyRSSpackage by Robert Myles it is possible to make an email template that can provide short and informative updates. In his blog, I’m going to share how thejinjarandtidyRSSpackages work and show how to combine them to make a simple daily email newsletter.
Read on to learn how.
Comments closedDavid Wilson needs to open a module:
When you’re testing PowerShell modules, importing, referencing, and removing modules can be a little bit tricky. These are some things that I’ve found to make tests more reliable.
Click through for several tips on how to do this.
Comments closedEd Pollack wants to know what time it is:
Converting a current time from one time zone to another is relatively easy. Regardless of whether daylight savings is involved or not, one simply needs to retrieve the current time in both time zones, find the difference, and apply that difference as needed to date/time calculations. Historical data is trickier, though, as times from the past may cross different daylight savings boundaries.
This article dives into all the math required to convert historical times between time zones. While seemingly academic in nature, this information can be used when building applications that interact between time zones and need to apply detailed rules to those applications and their users. These calculations will be demonstrated in T-SQL and a function built that can help in handling the math for you.
The pro tip is to store all data in UTC and perform date and time calculations at the edge, where you know the user’s time zone. Ed has plenty of good advice in here as well.
Comments closedLukas Vileikis continues a series on MySQL backup options:
There are many tools we can use to back up our MySQL databases. Some are well-known and used by the best technology companies out there (
mysqldumpcomes to mind), and some are a little less famous, but still have their place in the MySQL world. Entermydumper– the tool is built by the engineering team over at Percona and it‘s supposedly created to address performance issues caused bymysqldump.
Read on to see what it is and how it works.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck does a bit of shuffling:
I loaded the data into a table in Azure SQL DB. For demo purposes, I want to transfer this data from a SQL table to a container in Azure Cosmos DB (with the NoSQL API). There are plenty of resources on the web on how to transfer a simple relational table to Cosmos DB, but I have some additional complexity. One column – flavor profiles – contains a list of flavors that is assigned to a beer.
Click through for one way to organize the data when dealing with arrays.
Comments closed