Ben Johnston in Databases How to build a data culture: the 8 technical pillars that make it work Building a data culture takes more than good intentions. Here are the technical pillars — from data discoverability to error... 19 April 2024 13 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Snake draft sorting in SQL Server, part 2 Part of a series: [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 ] In my previous... 15 April 2024 7 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Snake Draft Sorting in SQL Server: Distributing Workloads Evenly (Part 1) Snake draft sorting in SQL Server divides processing tasks into evenly-distributed groups by assigning work in a serpentine order. Part... 12 April 2024 8 min read
BI Dennes Torres in BI Fabric and Azure SQL in a few clicks: Mirroring a Database Finally, mirroring is available for Fabric! You can mirror an Azure SQL to Fabric. It works for CosmoDB and Snowflake... 12 April 2024 11 min read
Editorials Louis Davidson in Editorials Giving Feedback on Microsoft Data Platform Tools As a data professional, there is a set of tools that you use on pretty much a daily basis. Before... 08 April 2024 3 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming SQL Server Pagination Performance: Sorting by Large Text Columns SQL Server OFFSET-FETCH pagination becomes extremely slow when sorting by large text columns (varchar(max), nvarchar(max)). Learn to fix it using... 25 March 2024 9 min read
Database Administration Aaron Bertrand in Database Administration Get the most out of SQL Server Agent logs If you haven’t migrated your workloads to a managed database platform yet, you’re probably still relying on SQL Server Agent... 11 March 2024 6 min read
Ben Johnston in SQL Server Batch Delete in SQL Server: Six Patterns for Large-Scale DELETE Operations Six practical T-SQL patterns for deleting large numbers of rows in SQL Server without locking tables, blocking users, or growing... 01 March 2024 25 min read
T-SQL Programming Edward Pollack in T-SQL Programming 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,... 29 February 2024 17 min read
Database Administration Aaron Bertrand in Database Administration Upgrade SQL Server on your workstation Lately, I’ve seen many people struggling to upgrade their workstation to the latest version of SQL Server. The main source... 26 February 2024 6 min read
Database Administration Aaron Bertrand in Database Administration Leave it better than you found it This is for the folks who still have to log into remote machines and do work manually on the box.... 12 February 2024 8 min read
BI Dennes Torres in BI Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches in Microsoft Fabric Nikola Ilic, best known as Data Mozart, published a great article and video about how to make semantic model data... 25 January 2024 9 min read
Database Administration Edward Pollack in Database Administration The Importance of Retention It is always an afterthought. New objects are created that start off small and current. New feature development takes over... 19 January 2024 24 min read
Database Administration Aaron Bertrand in Database Administration Optimized locking in Azure SQL Database I don’t think I’ve ever had a great impression of Azure SQL Database as a place for production applications. In... 08 January 2024 8 min read
T-SQL Programming Itzik Ben-Gan in T-SQL Programming Two-Dimensional Interval Packing in SQL Server: Itzik Ben-Gan’s Unpack/Pack Solution Itzik Ben-Gan's two-dimensional interval packing challenge in SQL Server: packing overlapping student schedule intervals across date and period axes. Complete... 02 January 2024 17 min read
Ben Johnston in SQL Server 11 proven data warehouse load patterns (complete guide, part two) 11 proven data warehouse load patterns — revised date, modified flag, hash comparison, history tables, and more — with the... 31 December 2023 30 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming Counting more efficiently Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post called “Bad habits : Counting rows the hard way.” In that post,... 20 December 2023 7 min read
BI Dennes Torres in BI Using Spark Jobs for Multiple Lakehouse Maintenance in Microsoft Fabric I have published videos and articles before about Lakehouse maintenance. In this article I want to address a missing point... 17 December 2023 12 min read
T-SQL Programming Aaron Bertrand in T-SQL Programming When an update doesn’t update Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: I changed data from my application, but when I checked the database,... 27 November 2023 5 min read
Ben Johnston in SQL Server Getting started with data warehouse load patterns (complete guide, part one) The requirements, prerequisites, and general patterns behind every solid data warehouse load — from natural keys and refresh rates to... 26 November 2023 28 min read
