If you are a Star Trek fan, you’ve seen the future of medicine, or at least how the writers imagine it will be. Painless, needless injections are given by hypospray devices, right through clothing with no chance of cross-contamination. The medical tricorder provides an accurate diagnosis in seconds. Broken bones, illnesses, and injuries are quickly … Read more
In the previous article of this series, Andy Brown of Wise Owl Training explained how to use the oh-so-important CALCULATE function in DAX to make changes to the default filter context within a formula. This article shows how you can use the FILTER function to do something similar and explains the differences between the two approaches. … Read more
The Matrix is one of the many built-in visualizations found in Power BI. While the Matrix is easy to populate, filtering it is not so straightforward. In this article, Dennes Torres explains how to add a slicer that does the job.… Read more
A BI project should return value to the company quickly, not only after months or even years of work. In this article by Gogula Aryalingam, Ruthie, the intern, determines which items from her manager's requirements she can complete before the big meeting. She continues working on her semantic model by including a Date table, the star schema, measures, formatting, and more.… Read more
Data analytics has become one of the powerful domains in the world of data science. An enormous amount of data is being generated by each organization in every sector. Computer science has found solutions to store and process this data in a smart way through a distributed file system. One such example is Azure Data Lake. It uses the Hadoop Distributed File System, and to perform analytics on this data, Azure Data Lake storage is integrated with Azure Data Analytics Service and HDInsight. In this article, Suhas Pande will explain how to store data using Azure Data Lake and how to perform data analysis on it using U-SQL, a big data SQL and C# language. … Read more
While architecting cloud native applications, you need to ensure that your system is highly available, performant, scalable, fault tolerant, and has the capability to recover from a disaster scenario. In this article, Samir Behara discusses the options available when designing the database architecture to achieve scalability.… Read more
SQL Server Reporting Services has changed quite a bit since it was introduced in 2004. Despite new analytic services like Power BI, SSRS is still a popular tool for paginated reports. In this article, Kathi Kellenberger explains the architecture of SSRS and walks you through installing an SSRS development environment on your workstation or laptop.… Read more
If you have worked with databases long enough, you probably have many frightening stories to tell about things that have gone awry on the job or problems that were difficult to solve. Accidently dropping a table or trying to fix an issue with the CIO standing right in your cube, repeatedly asking if you’ve fixed … Read more
Building on the introduction to the SQL used by Cosmos DB in the first article in the series, here you will learn how to handle some of the more classic challenges that you may face when querying JSON documents. Adam Aspin shows you some of the workarounds that are useful in practice when finding and shaping output data ready for further analysis.… Read more
Security is, or at least should be, the priority for any IT system. In this article, Cynthia Dzikiti discusses the security aspects of ERP systems and some of the techniques used to protect data.… Read more
GDPR enforcement began in May of 2018, but if you are doing business in the US, you may not think it applies to you. Grant Fritchey explains why you might be wrong about that and why you need to act now. … Read more
The sa account is the most powerful account in a SQL Server instance, and most DBAs disable it. There are several other built-in accounts that you may not think about that often. Robert Sheldon continues his SQL Server security series with an article about built-in accounts.… Read more
Temporal tables were introduced with SQL Server 2016. To take advantage of this feature, you might start fresh with a brand new table. It is possible, however, to convert an existing table with accumulated history to the new functionality. In this article, Mala Mahadevan explains how to create temporal tables for both scenarios.… Read more
Even when creating games, your code has access to environment variables and document files. In this article, Lance Talbert shows how to access files to convince the player that maybe the game knows more than it should.… Read more
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”Phil Karlton I’m terrible at naming things. I recently wrote some quick code to reproduce a design problem and demonstrate several options for solutions, and later realized that I’d named my objects dbo.Foo, dbo.FooFoo, and dbo.Wat. But I feel strongly about a … Read more
Each year, Redgate runs a survey to ask the folks at companies, from DBAs and Devs to CIOs, about how they monitor SQL Server. Those insights help us understand how we can make SQL Monitor more valuable to DBAs – or anyone responsible for the “care and feeding” of a SQL Server. The Estate Management … Read more
This article by Adam Aspin reviews the Azure Cosmos DB SQL API from the perspective of the relational database developer. More specifically it will show you how to leverage your Structured Query Language skills to exploit the core possibilities of Cosmos DB as a NoSQL document database.… Read more
Index maintenance can be a real headache for database administrators as tables grow larger and maintenance windows shrink. In this article, Greg Larsen demonstrates resumable index operations available with SQL Server 2017 and 2019. This feature helps DBAs work around those small maintenance windows by allowing certain index operations to be paused and restarted again later.… Read more
NASA recently named a facility in honour of Katherine Johnson, the mathematician who performed the calculations for space flights in the 50s and 60s. She was one of the “human computers” whose stories were made famous by the movie Hidden Figures just a few years ago. Until that movie was released, the contributions of these … Read more
New releases of SQL Server arrive at a quick pace, and it's difficult to keep up with the many features introduced in each version. In this article, Phil Factor reviews a feature you may have missed, inline indexes. He covers the syntax and the many ways they can be used and then performs some performance tests to see if they can make a difference with table variables.… Read more
Compliant Database DevOps
