A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Brent Ozar has another year of salary data:
We asked what you make, and 1,747 of you in 69 countries answered. Altogether, you made $171,879,034 this year. Hubba hubba, there’s some earning power in this audience.
Download the Data Professional Salary Survey results (XLSX).
Click through for more details on the process.
Comments closedMelissa Coates has an update for us:
An updated version of the Power BI End-to-End diagram is now available as of January 4, 2021.
This update is as of January 4th and includes things like Azure Purview. Melissa also shows how it has evolved over time, which is particularly interesting for Power BI given its rate of change.
Comments closedJack Vamvas contrasts Kerberos and NTLM:
There is a message found in SQL Server Error Logs similar to
The SQL Server Network Interface library could not register the Service Principal Name (SPN) [ MSSQLSvc/myserver.net:60000 ] for the SQL Server service. Windows return code: 0x200b, state: 15. Failure to register a SPN might cause integrated authentication to use NTLM instead of Kerberos. This is an informational message. Further action is only required if Kerberos authentication is required by authentication policies and if the SPN has not been manually registered.
The line I’m interested in reviewing is Failure to register a SPN might cause integrated authentication to use NTLM instead of Kerberos. It’s good to first understand the differences between Kerberos & NTLM – both supported by SQL Server during AD authentication
Read the whole thing. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “Windows authentication = Kerberos”—I do that myself far too often.
Comments closedUwe Ricken continues a series on heaps in SQL Server:
The PFS page “can” become a bottleneck for a heap if many data records are entered in the heap in the shortest possible time. How often the PFS page has to be updated depends mostly on the data record’s size to be saved.
This procedure does not apply to clustered indexes since data records in an index must ALWAYS be “sorted” into the data volume according to the defined index value. Therefore, the search for a “free” space is not carried out via the PFS page but via the value of the key attribute!
Read on for more detail.
Comments closedMatthew McGiffen has a query for us:
Some time ago I wrote a query store version of the “Top 20 queries” query that will produce a ranked list of your most expensive queries – and I’ve ended up using this a lot.
The only downside of using the DMVs for Query Store is that they are per database whereas dm_exec_query_stats is a view across the whole instance. So I had to use a cursor and a temp table, populating the temp table for each database in turn.
Click through for the query.
Comments closedTomaz Kastrun laughs at 24-day advent calendars:
In the last two days we have focused on understanding Apache Spark through performance tuning and through troubleshooting. Both require some deeper understanding of Spark and Azure Databricks, but gives also a great insight to all who will need to improve performance and work with Spark.
Today, I would like to list couple of additional Learning material, documentation and any other additional resources for further exploration on Azure Databricks.
Click through for links to additional resources on Apache Spark and Databricks, as well as the other 30 entries in the series.
Comments closedMarco Russo takes us through the evolution of a language:
Microsoft released 4 new DAX functions, and added 49 financial functions to DAX which correspond to identical Excel functions:
Read on for the summary of those changes, as well as additional important events for DAX and some of the stuff that Marco and Alberto have been working on throughout the year.
Comments closedPaul Turley continues a series on relationship modeling in Power BI:
So far, you’ve seen that the essential components of a data model include tables related to each other. Filtering records in one table prorogates the filter to related tables(s), causing records in the related table to be filtered. This dimensional model schema is the foundation of the reporting solution. Once the fact and dimension tables are in-place, you can create more advanced solutions by working outside of this standard relationship pattern.
Read on for the full story.
Comments closedShane O’Neill implements a linear backoff strategy:
Pushups are hard! Even when I’m not trying to rep out as many as I can, they still take a toll on the body. Soon a five-minute break is not enough, and I’m taking longer and longer rests.
Fine, if that’s the way we’re going to do this, then I’m going to go with the flow.
I can confirm that pushups are hard. Also, click through for a link to the backoff script.
Comments closedChris Webb answers a timeless question:
One question I get asked all the time is this:
Why don’t you add [insert feature idea here] to Power BI?
It’s sometimes followed up by one or more of the following comments:
It would be so easy for you to do
I can’t believe you haven’t done it already
Power BI is unusable without it
[insert competitor name here] has had this feature for years…and a real or virtual exasperated sigh.
Read on for the answer. This isn’t special to Power BI or even Microsoft—once you start to have customers with competing interests, these decisions get a lot harder.
Comments closed