The year is 1999, somewhere in Cambridge, UK. Kathi, a member of the Data-Philes team, is reading a memo sent from her manager. The memo talks about someone who disrupted a project management meeting in London. He claims he is from 20 years in the future. Chris walks in. Chris: Kathi, have you seen the … Read more
With SQL Server 2019 on the way, it’s time to begin learning about all the new features. In this article, Dennes Torres demonstrates how to use the new SHORTEST_PATH function that is part of the Graph Database feature. … Read more
Robert Sheldon continues his DevOps series with a look at security, privacy, and compliance. He recommends that these critical areas are tackled early in the DevOps pipeline.… Read more
You can use SQL Audit to record changes to security, access to tables, and more to help you meet compliance requirements. In this article, Joshua Feierman explains how to set up the audit and collect the data in Azure Log Analytics when running SQL Server in an Azure VM.… Read more
React is a popular JavaScript library for creating interactive UIs. In this article, Julio Sampaio shows you how to write your first ASP.NET app that takes advantage of its components for each of use and reusability. … Read more
I’ve worked with Microsoft technologies for over 20 years and, during that time, earned a good income to support my family and have a comfortable life. Despite that, Microsoft manages to break my heart again and again. Take the sad saga of the Windows Phone. I was working for Microsoft when the first Windows Phones … Read more
One of the hallmark features of video games is the ability to choose or even customize your character. In this article, Lance Talbert shows how easy it is to let the player create custom characters for your game, especially when you can take advantage of premade image assets available online. … Read more
You can now write applications in C# or F# that take advantage of Apache Spark. In this article, Edward Elliott walks you through installing everything you need and creating your first Apache Spark app.… Read more
The React library allows teams to work faster and with more consistency. In this article, Camilo Reyes explains how to get started using React components in a C# application. … Read more
Back when I was working on a master’s degree, one of our professors told us a story about a colleague who learned how to navigate the Unix system. She was so thrilled about learning this new skill that, in her exuberance, she stumbled upon some hidden human resource files containing confidential information. Eventually, an administrator … Read more
When the DevOps pipeline does not include the database, the database can become a bottleneck and slow down the delivery of new features. In this article, Robert Sheldon discusses the challenges involved with including the database and how to overcome them. … Read more
Joe Celko explains why questions requiring yes or no answers are more complicated than you might realize in both spoken language and computing.… Read more
Kathi Kellenberger continues her series on SSRS. In this article you learn how to use parameters that let your report users control how the reports are filtered.… Read more
So far in this series, Andy Brown of Wise Owl Training has shed light on functions like CALCULATE, VALUES and FILTER, but it’s only when you understand the idiosyncrasies of the EARLIER function that you can claim to have genuinely cracked DAX. This article gives four examples of the use of this peculiar function, in the process explaining why it has such a misleading name. Using the EARLIER function properly all boils down (as is so often the case with DAX) to understanding row and filter context. The article also shows how to use the RANKX function to sort data into your required order.… Read more
Dealing with errors is one of the essential elements of programming applications. The way to do so has changed over the years and versions of ASP.NET. In this article, Dino Esposito discusses how handle exceptions with ASP.NET Core 3.0.… Read more
PolyBase has been around since 2016, but Microsoft is enhancing it in 2019 with the ability to connect to more data sources. You can now use PolyBase to connect to other SQL Server instances, and it’s easy to set up with a wizard. In this article Benjamin Weissman explains what’s new in PolyBase and walks you through setting it up and connecting to an external table.… Read more
In my previous career many years ago, I worked at a hospital along with about ten other pharmacists. The department manager came up with one primary metric for evaluating pharmacists: the average time taken to fill each drug order. While this system did produce a metric, it was the wrong one. The worst pharmacist in … Read more
Microsoft continues to enhance the performance of SQL Server with new features. In this article, Monica Rathbun explains how to work with columnstore indexes, a different way to store tables that can drastically improve the performance of specific workloads.… Read more
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