A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
To demo what I mean, I’m going to take the Users table from the Stack Overflow database, and I’m going to pretend that we’re only storing the Id column, and the rest of the columns are JSON, stored in a UserAttributes column. Let’s create a new Users_JSON table to simulate it:
Read on and stay tuned for the way that SQL Server 2025 changes this.
Leave a CommentChad Callihan is excited about a limitation:
I had written most of this blog post before seeing this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invite. I decided to hold off a few days to post because, while it’s no secret, I think it’s worth pointing out to those that may not know: before you spend time testing SQL Server 2025, make sure you consider what version of Developer Edition to use.
You may read that and ask, “What do you mean? Isn’t there only one Developer Edition?” That used to be the case, but not anymore.
Read on to see why this is important for a large number of companies.
Leave a CommentTomaz Kastrun has some fun with Pi:
We will do this in the following steps (for the word “eggs”):
- Encode the word EGGS to numbers. E = 5, G = 7, G = 7 and S = 19. Together concatenated we get the string of 57719.
- We store a veeery long string of PI number.
- Start looking in PI number for substring of “57719”.
Click through for the R code.
Comments closedPatrick Gruenauer plays his trap card:
In PowerShell, error handling is a crucial aspect of writing robust and reliable scripts. One of the powerful features to manage errors gracefully is the
trapstatement. Thetrapstatement allows you to define a block of code that runs whenever a terminating error occurs in your script. This can be particularly useful for logging errors, cleaning up resources. Let’s dive in.
Read on to see how it works. My preference would be to use try/catch blocks instead of trap statements, but it is interesting to see it there.
Comments closedHans-Jürgen Schönig demonstrates a new capability in PostgreSQL:
PostgreSQL 18 brings a couple of performance related features to the table which will help applications to run more efficiently, providing a better and more enjoyable user experience. One of those performance features is called “skip scans”. Most of you might ask yourself at this point: Wow, sounds cool, but what is a skip scan? The purpose of this post is to shed some light and explain how this works, what it does and most importantly: How one can benefit from this feature in real life.
Click through for the demo.
Comments closedTwinkle Cyril makes an announcement:
Managing data consistency during ETL has always been a challenge for our customers. Dashboards break, KPIs fluctuate, and compliance audits become painful when reporting hits ‘half-loaded’ data. With Warehouse Snapshots, Microsoft Fabric solves this by giving you a stable, read-only view of your warehouse at a specific point in time and now, this capability is Generally Available! Think of this as a true time travel database, an industry-first capability that sets us apart.
I wonder how much they differ from the database snapshots available in SQL Server.
Comments closedGreg Low takes a peek at something fairly new to SQL Server Management Studio:
But users were only an early part of this story. Whether you want users contained or not, there are so many configurations at the server level that people wanted to be able to configure at each database, instead of only at the server. So, we saw the introduction of Database Scoped Configurations.
What was missing from this was a UI for setting them.
Read on to see how that has changed.
Comments closedHowever, SQL Server 2025 does bring some great options for doing fuzzy string matches, making custom Data Quality options even richer. I’ve spoken about this at some user groups recently (including tomorrow, remotely for TriPASS, and in a few weeks in Melbourne and Sydney for Difinity), and in that session I go much deeper into how I see data matching going. I’ll also write more about these methods in future posts, but it’ll take a few posts, covering quite a few sub-topics.
If you want to see that session, our user group (the Triangle Area SQL Server Users Group) is hosting it Wednesday morning Australia time, or this evening US Eastern Standard Time.
Comments closedSebastiao Pereira has another way of populating a random variable:
Generating random numbers from a normal distribution is essential for accuracy and realistic modeling. Used for simulation, inference, cryptography, and algorithm design for scientific, engineering, statistical, and AI domains. Is it possible to create random Gaussian numbers in SQL Server using the Ziggurat algorithm without external tools?
I was not familiar with this technique, so it’s neat to see it in action.
Comments closedAmy Abel describes an architecture:
I’ve been learning about Azure Managed Cassandra recently, and it’s very different from the usual relational SQL Server database. The documentation and tutorials can seem confusing at first, but once I broke things down it was easier to understand basic concepts.
Read on for a warning about different flavors of Cassandra, as well as how Microsoft has organized things in their implementation of Cassandra.
Comments closed