Query Exercise: Improving Cardinality Estimation
Your challenge for this week is to tune a query. Say Stack Overflow has a dashboard that shows the top-ranking users in their most popular location. It’s even got an index to support it
2024-02-16
Additional Articles
Scientific Calculations in Power BI - Cube, Square, Logarithms, Powers, Inverse and more
Microsoft Power BI Desktop provides users with multiple ways to help shape and transform their data. One of the options users have is scientific calculations, which support operations like cube, square, logarithms, etc. Power BI has this option in the Power Query Editor mode, where the user can easily apply one of these transformations for any number-based columns. In this tip, we will overview this utility in Power BI and how to benefit from it.
2024-02-14
Planning a Database Testing Strategy for Flyway
With Flyway, you can adopt a test-driven development strategy that will allow you to test and evaluate databases, and database objects, at every phase of the database development lifecycle. The further down the delivery pipeline that bugs appear, the more costly in time and resources they are to fix. This approach will allow you to catch many of them before the database change even gets committed to version control, making a continuous delivery process much easier to adopt and sustain.
2024-02-12
Fun with Powershell
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.
2024-02-09
LangChain Prompt Templates with OpenAI LLMs
Learn how to get started with a few sample prompt templates by using the gpt-4 LLM within OpenAI and LangChain in a Databricks notebook.
2024-02-09
Query Exercise: Find the Best Time for Maintenance
If we’ve gotta take the database down for maintenance – perhaps a version upgrade, perhaps upgrading our own code, maybe scaling up the hardware – when’s the best time to do it?
2024-02-07
Resolving the MERGE statement attempted to UPDATE or DELETE the same row more than once error
I'm receiving the following error when attempting to run a T-SQL MERGE statement: "Msg 8672, Level 16, State 1, Line 123. The MERGE statement attempted to UPDATE or DELETE the same row more than once. This happens when a target row matches more than one source row.
2024-02-05
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 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 o
2024-02-02
Gracefully Handle Errors using TRY CATCH Logic in SQL Server Stored Procedures
Learn how to capture errors in SQL Server stored procedures and gracefully handle errors using Try Catch coding in your stored procedures.
2024-01-31
PowerShell Dynamic Parameters and SQL Server
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.
2024-01-29
Blogs
My 2024 in Data: Music
By Steve Jones
This is my last week of the year working (I guess I come back...
A New Word: Suente
By Steve Jones
suente– n. the state of being so familiar with someone that you can be...
Side Projects
Anyone (everyone?) who has ever tried to learn a programming language knows that to...
Forums
Automating Export of PowerQuery to SQL Server using DAX Studio...?
I wrote a PowerQuery that parses a table from a PDF, and I want...
Attaching an SQL Server database without Transaction Log Files through SQL Server Management Studio.
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Attaching an SQL Server database...
Superseded Indexes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Superseded Indexes
Question of the Day
Superseded Indexes
Which of these indexes is superseded by another?
See possible answers