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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 to present at conferences, such as SQL Saturdays, in a professional development track. If the […]
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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 and an unsuccessful one is that the successful person tried again while the other person […]
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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 set of solutions, STRING_AGG(). I would like to convince you to use STRING_AGG over the […]
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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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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 split it among different servers. Sharding is another term. It refers to partitioning data to […]
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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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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 SQL Data Warehouse is a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture designed for large-scale data warehouses. […]
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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 weight and they are always the preferred method for trace events. In addition, there are […]
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Big Data Round Up
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday was all about Big Data. See what the community has to say about Big Data with this collection of articles ranging from deep technical walk-throughs to musings about Big Data’s impact on our industry and the data professional. SELECT PostLinkAndCommentary FROM #TSQL2SDAY_Invitation ORDER BY LastName ASC Rob Farley gives us his […]