Comparing Groups for Similarities in Power Query – Using Cosine Similarity
Recently, my skills were put to the test when I needed to compare hundreds of Active Directory and SharePoint Groups to find similarities in their memberships.
2025-01-10
Additional Articles
SQL Server OPTION RECOMPILE for Simple Queries
Learn about SQL Server OPTION RECOMPILE and if used on simple, frequently executed queries if it causes excessive CPU usage.
2025-01-08
Data Documents and Common Sense
What can be so difficult in creating a sensible standard for Structured Data Documents? To understand why they tend to get improved into unusable complexity, I’ll need to explain a bit of background.
2025-01-06
Improved RCSI Ghost Cleanup in SQL Server 2022
An example of poor update performance under RCSI as compared with locking read committed. Details of an improvement in SQL Server 2022 that can help avoid the worst effects.
2025-01-03
The Data Center that Exploded
A while back, in a Simple-Talk editorial meeting, someone bet Phil Factor that he couldn't come up with a Halloween story. To our surprise he said he could, as long as he didn't have to keep to the strict literal truth. In the end, he came up with a story about a story, and it is true that he first told the story in a data Centre at Halloween!
2025-01-01 (first published: 2014-10-31)
10,375 reads
GUID in SQL Server
This tip's objective is to present and describe several T-SQL examples for creating, using, and analyzing GUIDs and assessing their uniqueness.
2024-12-30
SQL Server Forced Plans Overwite the Query Hash
A 16-year old SQL Server bug that means 'forced plans' have the query plan hash in place of the expected query hash. Includes an explanation and discussion of the term 'morally equivalent plan'.
2024-12-27
Convert Excel Workbooks to CSV with Microsoft Fabric
For my new mission, I set out to convert a list of files from Excel to comma-separated values (CSV). We upload the original Excel files to a Data Lake in Fabric. We then need to convert a specific worksheet and move the CSV files to a different folder in Data Lake.
2024-12-25
A gentle introduction to dbt
Over the past years, the tool dbt – short for data build tool – has become quite popular in the data engineering world for handling such an ELT process. dbt takes on the role of the “T”, meaning it’s responsible for transforming the data in a certain data store.
2024-12-23
Data Warehouse Considerations - SCD Type 2 vs Overwrite Dimension Tables
How we handle data warehousing updates to dimension tables is crucial and this article covers Slowly Changing Dimensions versus overwriting tables.
2024-12-20
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Webinar: Navigating the Database Landscape in 2026
By Steve Jones
For a number of years, we’ve produced the State of the Database Landscape report,...
Claude AI Convinced Me Not to Build an iPad App
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I coach volleyball and I do a lot of stat stuff on paper. I...
A New Word: Dolorblindness
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dolorblindness – n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s...
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Question of the Day
What's the Date?
In SQL Server 2025, there is a new function that returns the current date without the time. What is it?
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