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

0
3
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
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
17 December 2023
17 December 2023

Using Spark Jobs for Multiple Lakehouse Maintenance in Microsoft Fabric

0
2
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
22 November 2023
22 November 2023

Source Control with GIT, Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

0
15
Source control is fundamental when dealing with projects and sharing code between multiple developers. Power BI present some challenges related to source control. But it’s finally providing us with a solution to these challenges. Let’s analyse this piece-by-piece. According to your previous knowledge, you may would like to skip some section of this article. This … Read more
22 November 2023
22 November 2023

What is Microsoft Fabric all about?

0
6
In this article, we will introduce Microsoft Fabric and how it relates to Power BI Premium Capacity we will turn to the mechanics of capacity utilization, and we will briefly look at how to monitor the performance loads of our Fabric resources. In a future article we will dive into performance tuning of Fabric workloads. … Read more
16 October 2023
16 October 2023

Don’t use DISTINCT as a “join-fixer”

I’ve quietly resolved performance issues by re-writing slow queries to avoid DISTINCT. Often, the DISTINCT is there only to serve as a “join-fixer,” and I can explain what that means using an example. Let’s say we have the following grossly simplified schema, representing customers, products, and product categories: And then we have tables for orders … Read more
15 October 2023
15 October 2023

SQL Server Security Primer

SQL Server security structure, mechanisms and methods are very thoroughly documented in the Microsoft documentation, but it is quite daunting if you don’t already know about the functionality. I recently had a request to explain some security features of SQL Server so that internal audits could be completed. While thinking about the request and preparing … Read more