As a relative neophyte to PowerShell (something I will remind readers of every time I start a blog in this series!), I am not always sure I have the best way of doing things. In this blog, I am going to lay a bit of foundation for my job creation system, by building a set … Read more
Note: Please be kind on my PowerShell programming techniques. If I am doing something really horrible, let me know. I will change my code. As our team struggles to get to a place where we can do continuous integration, some of the biggest issues we have needed to work on is figuring out how to … Read more
From last November 4 to 8 I have been at PASS Summit in Seattle, attending excellent technical sessions and having the honour to deliver a lightning session, which is a small 10 minutes presentation. Why should you read this? Being one of the biggest data events in the world, PASS Summit usually exposes the present and … Read more
Creating ETL process can pose so many challenges we will only fully discover them when really building the ETL. Before you complain about modelling, the example here has no relation to data warehouse modelling. The ETL in question was a migration from a data source to another. The need for executing multiple times was mainly … Read more
Graph structures are something that I have lightly covered in my Database Design book in the last few book editions (the last coinciding with SQL Server 2016), implementing them with relational tables. In the next edition of my book that I am starting to write now, my goal will be to cover one of the … Read more
sp_describe_undeclared_parameters() promises a great deal, but delivers less. It was added mostly for executing application queries via sp_prepare using a TDS link, but has several quirks and restrictions that rather spoils its more general use. It is designed to provide you with all the parameters of a batch. You might use it when a SQL … Read more
That’s a strange title I hear you say but it’s an honest question. I’ve worked in IT now for over 20 years and have got used to working in an office full of men. In my current role out of about 10 members of the technical team there are 2 of us which, makes it … Read more
I’ve been working on a project unkindly nicknamed ‘The Gloop’ because the code is a bit amorphous. Basically, it is an approach to documenting SQL Server databases, using the facilities provided such as the metadata views and DMFs. Although it is relatively simple to record the result returned by a table-valued function I’d rather neglected … Read more
This script will copy out all the tables from one version of a database in native BCP format, and place them in a directory of your choice, but defaulting to your user area in a directory called BCPFiles. They are placed in sub directories based on your server name and database name, just to keep … Read more
Boy does time fly, and it is already mid January. The holidays flew by, and now the Christmas tree and (most of) the Christmas décor has been boxed up in the attic (yeah, there is a Santa on a shelf staring at me that he needs to be put up!). The college bowl games are … Read more
Power BI and Excel are tools so close to each other that Power BI was born inside Excel. Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View, they were all Excel plugins before being united and become Power BI. The ability to build an ETL, design a model and generate reports and dashboards with great storytelling make Power … Read more
You know what it’s like, you are running a service pack on SQL Server and 99.9% of the time it all runs smoothly but that odd 0.1% of the time when it doesn’t is usually in the middle of the night with no one around to call on. Well to spare you some pain I’ve … Read more
Here, in this blog, I’m continuing a theme that I started in a previous blog, ‘What’s in that database? Getting information about routines’. In that blog, I just wanted to provide a few examples of extracting metadata from SQL Server into Powershell and hinting about why one might want to do it. I’ll now show … Read more
There is a lot of information held in SQL Server metadata about your SQL Server procedures, triggers, views and functions. Some of it is valuable, other nuggets are useful and a few are rather dull but worthy. It really all needs to be tied together to tell the full story, especially if you are not … Read more
It is easy to attach details and documentation to a SQL Server database using extended properties. In fact, you can add a number of items of information to any database objects such as tables, views, procedures or users. If you use JSON to store the information, then you can, in addition, even monitor trends by … Read more
This blog is different than my normal T-SQL blogs I almost always do. But I know that I cannot be the only computer programmer who wants to wear a smart watch when working to get some of the health and alert benefits that they can provide. The band though, has always been a blocker to … Read more
Power BI dataflows is a powerful self-service ETL tool. However, some features demand the use of Power BI Premium, way more expensive than the PRO version and sometimes inaccessible. One of these tasks, for example, is the merge of two tables. Even in the same dataflow, if you have two tables and make the merge, … Read more
Recently, we started adding compression to some of our larger tables in our data warehouse where columnstore indexes didn’t make sense. (For example, some very large dimension tables, and a few facts where they are not used for large aggregates in the common manner). The changes were checked into source control, we monitored performance, all … Read more
It has been a fun summer, sort of. 13 weeks ago, I had my left knee replaced to balance out my other two hip replacements on my right side. This is hopefully the last time that Dr Morrison of Southern Joint Replacement Institute ever has to cut into parts of my body with power tools. … Read more
I don’t know when I first heard about Redgate, but it might have been in 2005 when Steve Jones asked me to review their product, SQL Backup, for SQL Server Central. It was quite the coincidence when my manager asked me a few weeks later if I had heard of SQL Backup and would I … Read more
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