Data science, machine learning, data mining, advanced analytics, or however you want to name it, is a hot topic these days. Many people would like to start some project in this area. However, very soon after the start you realize you have a huge problem: your data. Your data might come from your line of […]
SQL Server Agent can be used to run a wide variety of tasks within SQL Server. The built-in monitoring tools, though, are not well-suited for environments with many servers or many databases. Removing reliance on default notifications and building our own processes can allow for greater flexibility, less alerting noise, and the ability to track […]
Of late, there’s been a lot of noise around the term, GDPR. Chances are, some of us even had to go through learning sessions targeted at IT professionals to learn about what this new standard of data protection means. GDPR is primarily a European privacy law which sets a new bar, globally, on privacy rights, […]
Just like in Santa’s Bag of Goodies, every release of SQL Server often has something for everyone – be it enhancements to DMVs for the DBAs, new functions for T-SQL developers or new SSIS control tasks for ETL developers. Likewise, the ability to effectively support many-to-many relationships type in SQL Graph has ensured that there […]
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management systems (RDBMS) that, at its fundamental level, stores the data in tables. The tables are the database objects that behave as containers for the data, in which the data will be logically organized in rows and columns format. Each row is considered as an entity that is […]
Introduction Sometimes we need to store information including photos in our database. For example, the photo of the product, the photo of the team members. But how can we store images in SQL Server? We could create an application in .NET or Java, but if we do not have experience in those programming languages, we […]
We manage data in a growing environment where our clients query some of our data, and on occasion will query past data. We do not have an environment that scales and we know that we need to archive some of our data in a way that allows clients to access it, but also doesn’t interfere […]
SQL Server table hints are a special type of explicit command that is used to override the default behavior of the SQL Server query optimizer during the T-SQL query execution This is accomplished by enforcing a specific locking method, a specific index or query processing operation, such index seek or table scan, to be used […]
With a distinct lack of up-to-date, fully featured or built-in options to get Reporting Services content cleanly from A to B, it can often be a challenging task maintaining proper Development and QA environments or even moving reports from a SharePoint integrated installation to a native mode one, and vice versa. I want to explore […]
Description When building reporting structures, we typically have the need to build fact and dimension tables to support the apps that will consume this data. Sometimes we need to generate large numbers of dimension tables to support application needs, such as in Tableau, Entity Framework, or Power BI. Creating this schema by hand is time-consuming […]
Whenever a query is run for the first time in SQL Server, it is compiled and a query plan is generated for the query. Every query requires a query plan before it is actually executed. This query plan is stored in SQL Server query plan cache. This way when that query is run again, SQL […]
Dynamic management views (DMVs) and dynamic management functions (DMFs) are system views and system functions that return metadata of the system state. On querying the related system objects, database administrators can understand the internals of SQL Server. It allows us to monitor the performance of the SQL Server instance, and diagnose issues with it. SQL Server […]
Introduction I was training some Oracle DBAs in T-SQL and they asked me how to create arrays in SQL Server. I told them that there were no arrays in SQL Server like the ones that we have in Oracle (varray). They were disappointed and asked me how was this problem handled. Some developers asked me […]
Good, clean and reliable data is important for every company, because well-analyzed data will open new possibilities to success. When we look at successful companies, we see that they’ve analyzed customers, sales, and finance data very well. At this point, a game changer enters: machine learning. Machine learning Machine learning is a type of artificial […]
Some of my previous articles on Python provided insight of the basics and the usage of Python in SQL Server 2017. Why would a SQL Server DBA be interested in Python An overview of Python vs PowerShell for SQL Server Database Administration Data Interpolation and Transformation using Python in SQL Server 2017 This article is […]
Introduction One of the new features announced with SQL Server 2017 is support for the Python language. This is big! In SQL Server 2016, Microsoft announced support for the R language – an open source language ideally suited for statistical analysis and machine learning (ML). Recognizing that many data scientists use Python with ML libraries, […]
A few years ago, one common business case I came across in my professional career that required modelling of data into a many-to-many entity relationship type was the representation of a consultants and their projects. Such a business case became a many-to-many entity relationship type because whilst each project can be undertaken by several consultants, […]
As all other database engines that require a GUI too to interact with, Microsoft built SQL Server Management Studio as a tool that provides an environment to manage, configure, monitor and administrate the SQL Server infrastructure for different kind of instances, that are installed locally at your machine, on a remote server with Windows or […]
This collection of content will describe BI performance monitor counters (OS, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS) that can be encountered more or less commonly, which includes the description, steps that should be taken and additional resources that could be used for more serious troubleshooting Operating System (OS) % A C D P % % free space % processor […]
Applies to SSAS Description This performance counter relates to the measurement of Analysis Services Proactive Caching. It monitors the average rate of notifications of Analysis Services cube by the underlying source relational database. Once the cube has been notified of data changes, measure group partitions are always processed using Full Process which discards the contents […]
PowerShell has become the ultimate choice for many database administrators because of its efficient way of handling and managing automation in a simple, quick way. It’s built on .NET Framework and uses Object Models such as COM, ADSI, ADO, and WMI. PowerShell has replaced the traditional way of scripting that used many legacy scripting practices […]
The challenge One of the main tasks of a SQL Server database administrator is performance tuning. Sometimes, though, coders or developers don’t always prioritize database performance or query optimization. Here is a typical scenario Imagine that developers create a new table and then insert some records in a test environment and test their queries to […]
Every data warehouse developer is likely to appreciate the significance of having surrogate keys as part of derived fields in your facts and dimension tables. Surrogate keys make it easy to define constraints, create and maintain indexes, as well as define relationships between tables. This is where the Identity property in SQL Server becomes very […]
Introduction Graph database A graph database is a type of database whose concept is based on nodes and edges. Graph databases are based on graph theory (a graph is a diagram of points and lines connected to the points). Nodes represent data or entity and edges represent connections between nodes. Edges own properties that can […]
Introduction In SSAS, when I offer Power BI, Reporting Services, PowerPivot or SharePoint to connect to SSAS, the business analysts look scared. On the other hand, if I talk about MS Excel, everybody seems so happy and comfortable with it. Excel is still the most popular spreadsheet in the world even when there are a […]
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