I was talking with a good friend that has an environment with terabytes of information and to create a homolog or dev environment to him is a pain. He comes to me with a solution : A PowerShell script that gets only the first 1000 lines of each table, creates the inserts and schema files … Read more
Over the past year, the topic of AI has really blown up in the general public. However, AI was already something very important to most corporations, but the Large Language Models (LLM) made it extremely fashionable. When something becomes fashionable, a lot of people try to ride the wave with no care about the truth … Read more
As discussed in Part 1, by segregating our focus on developing code that behaves as expected from the focus on developing code that will be well structured, we have achieved the ability to eliminate wasteful and error prone manual chores. That by itself is a really big win, and I often use that aspect of … Read more
A colleague of mine once asked about cancellation tokens in AWS. This question got me thinking about this problem and got me curious on whether there is any support. Turns out it is an interesting topic with lots of pitfalls. If you don’t know about cancellations tokens, they are used in C# are used to … Read more
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
Every year, Redgate surveys technologists to ask a big question (through lots of little questions, naturally.) This year’s question was about their current data platform configuration and usage. Just before it was released, I read the results, and I have to say, some of the things I learned amazed me…until I thought a bit more … Read more
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
It is always an afterthought. New objects are created that start off small and current. New feature development takes over and the recently architected data structures become old news. Over time, data grows and suddenly a previously small table contains millions or billions of rows. Is all that data necessary? How long should it be … Read more
Introduction to the concepts of accessibility in designs We live in the height of the digital age, where the digital space has become a thriving community, with every person craving a great yet personalized experience. In this era, there is one centralized truth with undeniable clarity: Accessibility is no longer a mere option; it is … Read more
I don’t think I’ve ever had a great impression of Azure SQL Database as a place for production applications. In its early days, it was missing several important features (like data compression). While that hole has been plugged, there are still other limitations and differences you should be aware of, like T-SQL differences, lack of … Read more
Have you ever been in a situation that you want to call a cmdlet or a function with a parameter that depends on a conditional criteria that is available as a list? In this article I will show a technique where you can use PowerShell Dynamic Parameters to assist the user with parameter values. In … Read more
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
Data lineage is a component of modern data management that helps organizations understand the origins, transformations, and movement of their data. It is like a road map that shows us where our data has been, how it has changed, and where it is going, just like tracking the journey of a package: from the person … Read more
Aggregation is a widely used way to summarize the content of a database. It is usually expressed with GROUP BY clause or just using aggregate functions (like COUNT or SUM). When the database engine executes a query with aggregations, it produces individual rows need to compute the required output and then performs the aggregation as … Read more
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
Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a post called “Bad habits : Counting rows the hard way.” In that post, I talked about how we can use SQL Server’s metadata to instantly retrieve the row count for a table. Typically, people do the following, which has to read the entire table or index: To largely … Read more
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
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
When it comes to the development and operations (DevOps), one thing stands out as a critical aspect and that is troubleshooting. The primary goal of a DevOps team is to ensure that the product experiences zero to no downtime because every moment is crucial. Therefore, smooth delivery and uninterrupted uptime are paramount. To achieve this, … Read more
In this blog, we continue our exploration on PostgreSQL indexes which we started here. In that article, we learned what an index is, and how exactly indexes can help with query execution. But there is much more to learn about indexes! In this blog, we will keep exploring B-tree indexes. We will learn whether (and … Read more
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