Continuous delivery and automation are a couple of core concepts of DevOps. As a Data Professional, I have spent countless hours pushing through the resistance of people who feel the data tier should be left out of source control, automated…
If you are familiar with sqlhammer.com, then you know that I heavily specialize in the Microsoft Data Platforms. My experiences with Microsoft, and specifically the SQL Server products, established an expectation that explicit transactions would always commit/rollback successfully or there…
Microsoft Azure provides a convenient feature when creating a new Azure SQL Data Warehouse database. You can create the database from a backup of the Microsoft sample database, AdventureWorksDW. This is super fast and easy. It also has huge 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…
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,…
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…
When creating SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) dashboards, I like to use indicators to give clear and colorful data visualizations. In this post I am going to cover the use of indicators and demonstrate how to rotate your tables so that…
SQL Server 2014 CTP1 Product Guide has been released. List of Inclusions White papers SQL Server 2014 Mission Critical Performance SQL Server 2014 Faster Insights from Any Data SQL Server 2014 Platform for Hybrid Cloud SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP…