18 March 2024
18 March 2024

Department of Redundancy Department

Ever wonder all the reasons that we use databases instead of file systems? While we don’t think of it too much anymore, the first reason that databases came into existence was to remove redundancies. The first source of redundancy back in the dark ages, when I was just beginning the program, was a product called … Read more
12 March 2024
12 March 2024

Transforming and Analyzing Data in PostgreSQL

In our data hungry world, knowing how to effectively load and transform data from various sources is a highly valued skill. Over the last couple of years, I’ve learned how useful many of the data manipulation functions in PostgreSQL can supercharge your data transformation and analysis process, using just PostgreSQL and SQL. For the last … Read more
01 March 2024
01 March 2024

Building MongoDB Aggregations

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In the previous article in this series, I discussed how to use a find statement to retrieve data from a MongoDB collection. However, the find method is not the only option for retrieving document data. Another important method is aggregate, which lets you group documents, perform calculations on those groups, and in other ways extract … Read more
29 February 2024
29 February 2024

Find and Replace Text in Strings in T-SQL

String manipulation is an inevitable task for developers and data professionals alike. Despite all the best efforts to normalize databases, eventually we are faced with some sort of text-based data stored within a relational database and need to extract detailed information from it. Those of us who have tackled these challenges fully understand how code … Read more
25 January 2024
25 January 2024

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches in Microsoft Fabric

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Nikola Ilic, best known as Data Mozart, published a great article and video about how to make semantic model data available in Microsoft Fabric. This allows the data to be used in lakehouses or data warehouses. One major question that arises is, “should we use a top-down or bottom-up (or both) approach in Microsoft Fabric?” … Read more
22 January 2024
22 January 2024

Querying MongoDB Documents

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MongoDB provides an efficient environment for storing document data at scale. However, most of your interactions with MongoDB will not be related to storing data but rather to querying data. The better you understand how to retrieve the data you need, the more effectively you can interact with MongoDB and support your data-driven applications. To … Read more
02 January 2024
02 January 2024

Two-Dimensional Interval Packing Challenge

Packing intervals is a classic SQL task that involves packing groups of intersecting intervals to their respective continuous intervals. In mathematics, an interval is the subset of all values of a given type, e.g., integer numbers, between some low value and some high value. In databases, intervals can manifest as date and time intervals representing … Read more
26 December 2023
26 December 2023

Introducing the MongoDB Document

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MongoDB is a document database. As such, the data is stored as individual documents. A document is a data structure made up of one or more field/value pairs. Nearly everything you do in MongoDB is either directly or indirectly related to the documents that you store in a database or move in and out of … Read more
18 December 2023
18 December 2023

Using a SQL Tokenizer

Imagine this: you have several directories full of SQL script files, and you need to know where a certain table is used. You’d rather like the context too, so you can check the whole SQL Expression and work out why it is running so slowly. Maybe, from that same daunting set of several directories, you … Read more
17 December 2023
17 December 2023

Using Spark Jobs for Multiple Lakehouse Maintenance in Microsoft Fabric

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I have published videos and articles before about Lakehouse maintenance. In this article I want to address a missing point for a lot of Fabric administrators: How to do maintenance on multiple lakehouses that are located in different workspaces. One of the videos I have published explains the maintenance of multiple lakehouses, but only addresses … Read more