A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Kevin Chant threw a spanner in the works this time:
You can find out more about both T-SQL Tuesday and Festive Tech Calendar in my original invitation. Where I invited others to write about a Microsoft Data Platform announcement that they considered to be as amazing as a present. In other words, something which made you go “wow”.
Click through for a variety of responses and Kevin’s categorization of them.
Leave a CommentLouis Davidson looks back on the past:
I will admit that the feature I will mention probably won’t be relevant to you, as it has been nearly 30 years since this feature was introduced. But since this is the most nostalgic time of the year, I want to go back, through the mists of times, to a time where we hadn’t even quite begun to fear the changing of the centuries. To a time when we a single CPU was all we had even thought of, computer screens were often colorless, a few megabytes of RAM was all that was needed. It was a simpler time, though to be fair, it was also a time before we had sports on our phones.
Louis goes on to reminisce about an implementation of database quality guarantees in a world without foreign key constraints. Which is usually about the time I rag on MySQL for its insistence that foreign keys weren’t important to the product until relatively late in its existence (version 3.23, released in 2000).
Leave a CommentRob Farley cashed in all of his chips and got something nice out of it:
I had written to Santa (okay, the product group at Microsoft) to ask for this. It wasn’t quite “If I’m on the nice list, what I’d like is a unicorn train set”, but more like “If it’s not too much trouble, this thing here would be amazing…”
The thing was the ability to see the “number of rows read” by an Index Seek operation in a SQL plan containing the “Actuals” (post-execution).
Read on for information about why this is so useful.
Leave a CommentHugo Kornelis looks back at some nice additions to SQL Server:
It’s December. The last month of the year, and hence also the last T-SQL Tuesday of the year. Edition 181 is hosted by Kevin Chant. His chosen topic for this episode is to have us talk about which SQL Server announcement excited us the most.
This posed a bit of a problem for me. The only truthful answer here is that I have never been as excited about an announced new feature as when the Query Store was announced. But I also realized that I don’t have much to write about the Query Store, except how awesome it is. Okay, I could go on a full explanation, but many others do that much better, and have already done so. So that doesn’t leave much for me.
And that’s why I’ll also include my second favorite announcement.
Read on for a little bit around Query Store, followed up with coverage of several interesting additions to SQL Server over the years.
Leave a CommentAndy Brownsword gets into the spirit:
Reviewing performance for a SQL database over time can be a challenge without hand crafted tooling or using external monitoring apps. This isn’t about putting fires out, we’re looking at proactive monitoring and taking action for incremental improvements.
The Query Store comes to the rescue by providing built-in insights into key performance metrics over time. We can use different combinations of them to better understand how the database is working.
Query Store isn’t perfect, but it’s very good solution to an extremely common problem.
Leave a CommentDeepthi Goguri is pleased with a new spin on an existing product:
“SQL database in Microsoft Fabric is a developer-friendly transactional database, based on Azure SQL Database, that allows you to easily create your operational database in Fabric. A SQL database in Fabric uses the same SQL Database Engine as Azure SQL Database.”
As you read, this is a transactional database that can be created in fabric and can be replicated to Data Lake for the analytical workloads. The other main goal is to help build AI apps faster using the SQL Databases in Fabric. The data is replicated in near real time and converted to Parquet, in an analytics-ready format.
Read on to learn more about the offering. I’m still not 100% sold on its virtues versus simply having an Azure SQL Database and enabling mirroring.
Leave a CommentJosephine Bush is good enough:
This month, I prompted bloggers to discuss whether good enough is perfect. Thank you to all who posted on this topic!
Here are the highlights of the posts (in alphabetical order by last name):
Read on for posts from four contributors.
Comments closedThe French philosopher Montesquieu wrote, “Le mieux est le mortel ennemi du bien”, which means, “The best is the mortal enemy of the good.” Montesquieu was an interesting man who lived in the 18th century, and influenced many of the political structures around the world. His book “The Spirit of Law” from 1748 described ways to avoid absolute power, established concepts like “innocent until proven guilty”, and campaigned against slavery. I guess some countries adopted those ideas more than others.
I mentioned it because Josephine Bush has invited us to write about the topic of “Good enough is perfect“. And while I realise that the two statements are not identical, I consider that they are essentially the same. If we always strive for perfect then we can all too easily miss the mark of being able to deliver anything worthwhile. As a consultant I have to understand that the ideal solution for my customers is not the one where everything is completely perfect if achieving that means that the cost is too high. Instead, I need to find the point where good enough really is good enough.
Understanding value at the margin is a vital skill.
Comments closedTim Mitchell hires some data detectives:
Earlier this month, I hosted the monthly T-SQL Tuesday invitation in which I asked, “What’s in your data detective toolkit?” We got some great responses which I’ll recap here, and I’ll share a few thoughts of my own at the end.
Click through this month’s responses, as well as Tim’s answer to the question.
Comments closedAndy Yun wants you to use your earholes:
The All Powerful…
… Question. That is what I now believe is the most important tool for a Data Detective.
Asking Questions Effectively
This nuance involves HOW you ask a question. Some of this involves knowing your audience. Is this the right place or the right time? Sometimes there comes a point where asking questions is just counter-productive because your audience has no interest in answering. And it also means you need to make sure you’re asking the correct audience in the first place.
Asking questions is difficult, so instead, I just strawman my way to success.
Comments closed