A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Michael Mayer doesn’t want to wait:
From time to time, the following questions pop up:
- How to calculate grouped counts and (weighted) means?
- What are fast ways to do it in R?
This blog post presents a couple of approaches and then compares their speed with a naive benchmark.
Read on for multiple options and then a quick performance comparison.
Comments closedDave Stokes shares some queries:
I am (slowly) adding handy PostgreSQL queries to my GitHub, and Vacuum is the newest category. The end goal is to have a compilation of queries for those of us who need to keep an instance healthy.
I’ve always liked these compendia of helpful queries. The downside is that these are PDF images, making them harder to use. But even so, Dave is accepting pull requests.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck answers a question:
We’re a relatively small shop that has been using Power BI for our analytical needs for years now. We’re very pleased with the product, but the recent introduction of Microsoft Fabric has made us a bit anxious. When comparing Microsoft Fabric vs Power BI, it all seems very complex and we’re not even sure we need it. What will happen with Power BI? Will it be replaced with Fabric?
Click through for Koen’s advice and thoughts on the matter.
Comments closedPatrick LeBlanc is back with another compendium:
Welcome to the Fabric April 2025 Feature Summary! This update brings exciting advancements across various workloads, including Low-code AI tools to accelerate productivity in notebooks (Preview), session Scoped distributed #temp table in Fabric Data Warehouse (Generally Available) and the Migration assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview) to simplify your migration experience.
This one isn’t quite as long as last month’s release, but there are still a couple dozen entries.
Comments closedKellyn Gorman shares a few tips with us:
After the initial overview of memory monitoring in Oracle, particularly around the SGA and PGA, I wanted to take a deeper dive into the most common Oracle memory configurations. These include how memory settings are defined, how they interact, and the combinations you’re likely to encounter across different workloads. Oracle memory is a no-brainer for many of us who’ve been in the space for an extensive time, but I’ve come to realize, it can be a bit overwhelming and especially with recent changes from Oracle 12c on.
Click through for Kellyn’s guidance.
Comments closedKendra Little fixes a problem:
Forcing plans with Query Store can be a powerful tool—until it mysteriously fails. In real production systems, plan forcing sometimes just… doesn’t work. One common culprit is the cryptic
OPTIMIZATION_REPLAY_FAILEDerror.If you’re hitting
OPTIMIZATION_REPLAY_FAILED,try re-forcing the plan using@disable_optimized_plan_forcing=1.
Click through for a summary of the problem and additional helpful information on the issue.
Comments closedAndy Leonard doesn’t need to ask for permission:
The problem we are trying to solve is: Grant an Azure Data Factory permission to execute the ReST API method calls against artifacts in a Fabric workspace.
I begin visiting the Azure Portal. If you don’t have an Azure account, you can create one. You can do a lot of things in Azure for little money, but you need an account and that account needs to be secured by a working source of funds in case you leave a virtual machine running for days. Hypothetically. BE CAREFUL. DO NOT LEAVE A VM RUNNING FOR DAYS.
Good en passant advice. I once blew through a $250 Azure credit by laving an HDInsight cluster on for, uh, a few hours.
Comments closedIn this video, I cover some news from Microsoft around the deprecation of the Azure Machine Learning SDK v1. We’ll take a look at the upgrade guide and see what it will take to perform this upgrade.
Microsoft will still support the SDK v1 until September of 2026, so we have a year to get code sorted out. The CLI v1, however, will go away sooner, so be sure you’re keeping up on that.
Comments closedAndy Levy checks if this is the end of the month:
This is one of those blog posts you write so that 2 years later, you can look it up to remind yourself how to do something.
I found myself needing to figure out if “today” was the end of the month in PowerShell. In T-SQL, this is easy, as we have the
EOMONTH()function. But PowerShell (the .NETSystem.DateTimestruct) doesn’t have the same thing.
Read on for the solution Andy came up with.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers writes a SQL statement:
I come from a TSQL background, so using SQL makes it easy for me to work with data.
There are multiple ways to use SQL in a PySpark notebook, and when I started using a Python notebook it was not so straightforward.
In this blog post I will show you how I use SQL Code.
As mentioned previously I am by no means an expert, I typically find a way that works, is fast and doesn’t consume a lot of capacity. If that works consistently for me then that is how I go about it.
Click through for the solution, which uses DuckDB. As such, the SQL syntax isn’t T-SQL—it’s more like psql. But it does do a great job of interacting with Parquet files and Delta tables.
Comments closed