Synapse is a great data lake house tool. This means in a single tool we have resources to manage a data lake and data warehouse. The Synapse Serverless Pool is great to manage data lakes and for a great price: around us$ 5,00 for each TB of data queried. This makes it a great choice. … Read more
Solution Summary cards are the name I have given to simple 1-page documents we provide to developers to get up-to-speed on a particular solution. The primary use-case for these cards is to provide better on-boarding for new team members. An additional benefit is that crafting these short summaries forces people to review how your teams … Read more
The main gist of this article is that if you are starting any project where you want to both teach a subject or benchmark algorithms, the cleaner the machine you start with, the less competition you have from other software skewing the results. The only thing I installed on my new computer was SSMS and … Read more
Dynamic data mask is a very interesting security feature allowing us to mask critical fields such as e-mail, phone number, credit card and so on. We can decide what users will be able to see the value of these features or not. This feature faced many flaws when it was released, but I believe it’s … Read more
In my article “Filetables, Great For Business, Great For Hobbyist”, I implemented the basis of a hobby database I use for my Twitter accounts (@disneypicaday and @dollywoodp), where I post daily pictures of theme parks. As my inventory of prepped pictures has grown, one thing has become a major pain. Duplicates. I have tens of … Read more
It’s been a while since I last wrote a new blog, and it has been a very long time since I last wrote a fresh new “What Counts For a DBA” entry. I celebrate this with a pun title. The last technical blog I wrote was scheduled to be published on March 19, 2021 and … Read more
The last year hasn’t been easy and most of us, especially in the IT world, have learnt to exist inside our own 4 walls. One thing that has kept my husband and I (we are both DBA’s!) going is the data platform community. The community has given me so much over the years, the satisfaction … Read more
Edge constraints were added in SQL Server 2019 to make the node to edge relationship stricter/enforced, and more like typical foreign key constraints. When used, they define what node types can be used in the from and to position of the edge. What makes edges different than a many-to-many relationship in a relational table is … Read more
One of the weirder things about graph tables in SQL Server is the mysterious backend implementation. The values you see when working with these objects look like this: {“type”:”node”,”schema”:”dbo”,”table”:”Node1″,”id”:0}, but when you get errors, you don’t see the json, you see what this represents (two integers for the object_id and unique id in the graph … Read more
As I have been building my Twitter management software, I have been doing a lot more ad-hoc, repetitive coding using T-SQL directly. When I was generating new tweets for upcoming days, a bit of the process that got old quick was getting the date for an upcoming day (the primary key for my tweet table … Read more
Twelve and a half years ago I wrote my largest hit count article of my writing career Ten Common Database Design Mistakes. It currently shows as having over 1.2 million hits, despite having a misspelling in the first paragraph. After this length of time, you would think that things would have changed and we would … Read more
You may have noticed the export feature on Azure resource groups don’t like too much the Data Factory. We can’t completely export a Data Factory as an ARM template, it fails. Probably you know you don’t need to care about this too much. You can link the data factory with a github repo and get … Read more
Before computers, the British, US and Canadians all entered dates with the full month-name first, followed by the day number, followed by an ordinal suffix (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th etc) followed by the year. It was generally the full four-figure year. I know all this because I’ve just been converting many thousands of these … Read more
Writing data integrity code in TRIGGER objects is generally is pretty simple. Typically you write a query to see “is there a row in inserted/deleted that is not set up as desired for the current transaction?” and no bad data is found, keep moving. And because MOST of the time, you would only use a … Read more
In the third article of this series, Sanil Mhatre demonstrates how to perform a sentiment analysis using R including generating a word cloud, word associations, sentiment scores, and emotion classification. … Read more
With everything that’s been going on in the world recently and all events being cancelled or postponed you might mistakenly think that people’s ability to learn and stay in touch would dissipate. You couldn’t be more wrong. User Group Meetup Hub I am the UK Regional Mentor for PASS which means that I’m the go-to … Read more
The old measurements of length, area, volume and weight in the UK and the States refuse to die. They are known as the Imperial and US customary measurement systems respectively. Not only are they a natural way of dealing with approximate measurements, and tied to human dimensions, but they are no longer difficult to calculate. … Read more
In this last entry in the initial series of posts on building a SQL Agent Job Generator, I am going to add the ability to schedule the jobs that we generated in the previous post. The code that is available here in github: https://github.com/drsqlgithub/SSISDeployTool/tree/e8c44505bba6b3c764531c8b489101b39b5c27a7, is likely sufficient for some smaller organization’s needs with jobs. (Future … Read more
Creating ETL process can pose so many challenges we will only fully discover them when really building the ETL. Before you complain about modelling, the example here has no relation to data warehouse modelling. The ETL in question was a migration from a data source to another. The need for executing multiple times was mainly … Read more
Graph structures are something that I have lightly covered in my Database Design book in the last few book editions (the last coinciding with SQL Server 2016), implementing them with relational tables. In the next edition of my book that I am starting to write now, my goal will be to cover one of the … Read more
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