A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Sebastiao Pereira hearkens back to linear algebra courses:
Is there a way to perform matrix operations or calculations directly within the database, eliminating the need for an external matrix calculator in SQL Server?
Click through for a large number of functions. Sebastiao went all-out in this one.
Comments closedRyan Booz continues a series on pgNow:
In that first article, I shared how pgNow can be a lifesaver when you need immediate performance insights, highlighting features like query tuning and current activity monitoring. The tool’s ability to take periodic snapshots of query activity and spotlight active sessions has already been a significant help for early users.
Today, I wanted to look at another area of information that pgNow can help you explore during times of performance degradation or even as part of a regular database maintenance and hygiene: the Indexing tab.
Click through to see what’s in the feature and to get a free copy of the preview for pgNow.
Comments closedThey are organized by author, and in no particular order of importance, quality, or anything other than how they appear on my bookshelf.
I am saddened that the $20 I sent Erik did not make it in time for my glorious book on PolyBase in SQL Server 2019 to make it on his recommendations list.
Jokes aside, you could do a lot worse than starting off with the list Erik has. There are quite a few books I’d add to that list, but the idea is not to scare people away by recommending a stack of books as tall as they are.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers finds and replaces:
It is great to see the advancements in Power BI with regards to TMDL.
Recently I was working on a customer’s semantic model where I was doing some optimizations in the semantic model.
One of the changes I wanted to make was to replace the Dynamic Format String for the measures.
My challenge was that there were roughly 40 measures where the Dynamic Format String needed to be updated.
I could have done this using Power BI Desktop, but that would mean making the changes 40 times.
Read on to see how Gilbert was able to make this change en masse.
Comments closedIn this video, I provide an introduction to Bayes’ theorem, explaining the key concepts and terms, as well as solving a totally realistic problem via Bayesian analysis.
My goal in this video was to explain a counter-intuitive phenomenon: how much a positive test or piece of information moves the needle depends primarily on how frequently the event normally happens and how frequently we generate false positives in tests. The less common the scenario, the less your positive test actually moves the needle.
Comments closedPatrick Gruenauer catches ’em all:
Error handling is a critical aspect of writing robust scripts in any programming language. PowerShell provides a powerful structure for handling errors gracefully using
try,catch, andfinallyblocks. These constructs allows us to manage exceptions and ensure that important cleanup actions are performed, even when errors occur. In this blog post, I will show you how to use try catch finally in PowerShell. Let’s jump in.
Click through to see how the logic works in Powershell, as well as how you can read the exception itself in the catch block.
Comments closedJess Pomfret looks for old tables:
There are many reasons why you might end up with tables named
something_oldin your database. Perhaps this is part of your decommission strategy, to rename them to make sure they really aren’t in use. Or, it could be because you need to make schema changes, you can rename the current table and create a new table with the desired schema. But, the key to this blog post is when you then forget to come back and clean these tables up. We can easily find them with a dbatools command.
Read on to see how you can use dbatools cmdlets to find and remove these deprecated tables.
Comments closedAndrea Gnemmi looks at a pair of extensions:
We all know the importance of monitoring our RDBMS to ensure the performance and availability. Are there any tools that provide functionality to better to monitor PostgreSQL databases? In this article we will explore pg_stat_activity and pg_locks.
Click through for an overview of these two extensions and some of the functionality available in them.
Comments closedMarc Lelijveld provides a public service announcement:
When working with Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, exporting and reusing them across environments or tenants might seem like a harmless, even convenient, task. Whether you’re sharing a template with a colleague, moving assets between workspaces, or contributing to the community — the last thing you’d expect is to accidentally include data along with your code.
But that’s exactly what can happen.
For people who have worked with Jupyter notebooks in the past, this is a fairly obvious result. But if you aren’t familiar with the platform, that idea may seem weird. Marc does provide some options for exporting notebook contents, and you can also clear the cell contents before exporting.
Comments closedUmair Shahid preps for an update:
When multiple transactions need to modify the same rows, ensuring data consistency can become tricky. A single wrong approach to locking can lead to suboptimal performance or even bring your application to a standstill as numerous transactions block one another. One tool in PostgreSQL’s arsenal to handle concurrency is SELECT FOR UPDATE. It allows you to lock specific rows before updating them, preventing other transactions from modifying those rows until your transaction completes.
In this blog, we will dive deep into SELECT FOR UPDATE in PostgreSQL. We will explore how it helps in reducing contention, avoiding deadlocks, and ultimately boosting performance when dealing with highly concurrent applications.
Click through to understand how this works and also some notes on when to use it and when not to use it.
Comments closed