A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Mika Sutinen rounds up the usual suspects:
AWS, Azure and GCP all have a fully managed services for SQL Server databases. In this post, I’ll provide a brief overview of the offerings from these hyperscalers. While the main promise of the service remains the same across the hyperscalers, the capabilities, scale, and occasionally, the best use scenarios for each, differ.
Read on for a quick comparison of four offerings from the three cloud providers.
Comments closedEugene Meidinger has some thoughts:
The more I tried to research practical ways to make use of ChatGPT and Power BI, the more pissed I became. Like bitcoin and NFTs before it, this is a world inextricably filled with liars, frauds, and scam artists. Honestly many of those people just frantically erased blockchain from their business cards and scribbled on “AI”.
There are many valid and practical uses of AI, I use it daily. But there are just as many people who want to take advantage of you. It is essential to educate yourself on how LLMs work and what their limitations are.
I am saddened that my rants on the topic didn’t merit Eugene explicitly mentioning me. My natural response will be to rant harder until I receive the attention I desire. In the meantime, read the whole thing.
Comments closedEitan Blumin works on getting access back again:
This error occurs when SQL Server lacks the necessary permissions to access a file or folder, typically during a database attachment. It’s an indication that SQL Server is being denied access due to insufficient permissions.
Read on for a few situations in which the error can occur, and what you can do about it.
Comments closedAndy Brownsword has the right price in mind:
Its the time of year where things may winding down for the new year and we can get a bit of breathing room. With that free time you might want to try something new, let’s say some SQL Server in the cloud?
It could be a good time to start brushing up on new skills, seeing what the services have to offer, or maybe you want to start blogging!
You’re not going to be able to do a tremendous amount at these tiers, but it’s hard to beat that price.
Comments closedIn the Power BI service or Microsoft Fabric, you might encounter situations where you can’t download a report or model from a workspace. Depending on your workflow, this could be problematic; for instance, you might need to work further on this file in Power BI Desktop. To do that, you first need to recover a Power BI Desktop (PBIX) file or the newer format, Power BI Projects (PBIP).
Read on for several reasons as to why you might not be able to download the file, and what you can do about it, using the semantic link library and semantic-link-labs.
Comments closedSoheil Bakhshi shares some data:
This blog series complements a YouTube tutorial I published earlier this month, where I quickly covered the scenario and implementation of shared semantic models in Microsoft Fabric. However, I realised this topic demands a more detailed explanation for those who need a deeper understanding of the processes and considerations involved in one of the most common enterprise-grade BI scenarios.
Read on for part 2 of this series. Soheil also includes a link back to part 1 if you missed it.
Comments closedMarco Russo wraps up the year:
In 2024, DAX added several functions to support visual calculations – a Power BI feature still in preview at the end of the year 2024. These 12 functions cannot be used in measures, calculated columns, nor calculated tables – they can only be used in visual calculations: COLLAPSE, COLLAPSEALL, EXPAND, EXPANDALL, FIRST, ISATLEVEL, LAST, MOVINGAVERAGE, NEXT, PREVIOUS, RANGE, and RUNNINGSUM.
Read on to learn more about what Microsoft has done with DAX as a language, as well as what has kept the SQLBI team busy and what’s coming in 2025.
Comments closedHenrietta Dombrovskaya troubleshoots a performance problem:
It’s Christmas time and relatively quiet in my day job, so let’s make it story time again! One more tale from the trenches: how wrong you can go with one table and one index?
Several weeks ago, a user asked me why one of the queries had an “inconsistent performance.” According to the user, “Sometimes it takes three minutes, sometimes thirty, or just never finishes.” After taking a look at the query, I could tell that the actual problem was not the 30+ minutes, but 3 minutes – when you have a several hundred million row table and your select yields just over a thousand rows, it’s a classical “short query,” so you should be able to get results in milliseconds.
Read on for the problem, as well as how Henrietta was able to coerce the PostgreSQL optimizer into choosing the correct path.
Comments closedJon Voege has a collection of links for us:
This week, to round off the year, we try something different. I wanted to throw a shout out to all the community heroes out there, who also help make the most of Microsoft Fabric, through the use of Microsoft Power Platform (and vice versa).
Also, I wanted to highlight some of their contributions, and hopefully give you all a list of resources to peruse.
Click through for more than 20 links, showing how you can work with Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Pages, and data in Dataverse from Microsoft Fabric.
Comments closedTwo Of My Favorite NOLOCK Demos from Paul White and Aaron Bertrand
Erik has covered transaction isolation levels lately in videos. The first demo from Paul White shows an issue where queries stop scanning due to data movement. The second demo from Aaron Bertrand comes from this blog post.
Comments closed