SQLHammer in 2018
SQLHammer.com has been quieter than usual this year. I have not written nearly as many blog posts as I would like. The reason for this is because I have been very busy and I thought it was time to update…
Tell me your problems
I need your help. I am working on improving my department’s problem solving skills. This is going to manifest in a lot of one-on-one mentoring, team exercises, and formal presentations. The formal presentations I am going to build into sessions…
Failure Integrity Power Transparency Respect
The key to success is failure. There is much truth in that statement. It is also like a prism which can be perceived differently from many different angles. One angle is to say that, the difference between a successful person…
Transact-SQL STRING_AGG
Creating comma separated strings from a column, or delimited strings as I like to call it, is a very common problem in SQL. Beginning with SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database, there is now another option to the existing…
Amazon Redshift Temporary Tables
My company is in the middle of a migration to Amazon Redshift. Data warehouse design standards have been in question now that our platform is changing. One development team asked me whether they would be allowed to use temporary tables…
Linked Server Elimination
SQL Server has a feature for partitioning tables and indexes. Partitioning can be implemented at many levels, however. You can create multiple tables for one logical data set, you can split the set into multiple databases, and you can even…
What is a data lake?
Our zatz-its are wise. Our zatz-its are dispersed. We have questions to ask the zatz-its, so we corral them in a warehouse. Now everyone can see the zatz-its and ask any question that the zatz-it can answer. But buyer beware,…
What is a cloud data warehouse?
Amazon Redshift was announced in November of 2012 and became the first cloud data warehouse, opening a whole new segment of technology. What is a cloud data warehouse exactly? On-premises data warehouse While cloud data warehouses are relatively new, at…
SQL Data Warehouse – Fast row counts
A couple of years ago I published a script to calculate fast, light-weight, row counts for SQL Server on-premises. The need to view the row counts of tables has not diminished but new technologies have come to the fore-front. Azure…
5 Extended Events Sessions Your SQL Server Instance Cannot Live Without
SQL Server Extend Events is a general event-handling system. It correlates data from SQL Server and, to a limited degree, the operating system. Extended Events are an optimized replacement for SQL Trace. In most cases, Extended Events are much lighter…