Category: Business Intelligence (BI)
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Amazon Redshift Views, Sort Keys, and Outer Joins
My team built a process to load from a couple of base tables, in our Amazon Redshift enterprise data warehouse, into an other table which would act as a data mart entity. The data was rolled up and it included some derived fields. The SQL query had some complicity to it. This process ran daily […]
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Musings of a DevOps Data Pro
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 deployments, and who feel the need to make the data tier a separate work stream […]
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Amazon Redshift Unexpected Commit
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 would be an exception thrown to explain the problem. That expectation set the stage for […]
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NYC Yellow Cab Data in Azure SQL Data Warehouse
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 like dbo.FactInternetSalesReason with 64,515 rows! Oh, hold on I think I typo’ed. No, actually that is […]
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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 or not. They know that different database platforms handle temporary tables differently and there was […]
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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, our zatz-its are data, try not to stare. We have more snuvs than we can […]
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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 least from this decade, the data warehouse concept is not. A data warehouse is a […]
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Rotating Tables with Indicators in SSRS 2016
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 you can display the indicators horizontally. The method in this post has been tested on […]
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SQL Server 2014 CTP1 Product Guide
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 SQL Server 2014 FAQ datasheets SQL Server 2014 Datasheet Decks SQL Server 2014 Level 100 […]