dataMinds Connect 2024 – Session Materials
The slides and scripts for my session “Tackling the Gaps & Islands Problem with T-SQL Window Functions” at dataMinds Connect 2024 can be downloaded from GitHub. If you want...
2024-10-10
30 reads
Koen Verbeeck
Connect to Power BI as a Guest User in another Tenant
Sometimes your Microsoft Entra ID account (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) is added as a guest user in another tenant. This happens quite a lot when you’re a...
2024-09-27 (first published: 2024-09-19)
362 reads
How to use a Script Activity in ADF as a Lookup
In Azure Data Factory (ADF, but also Synapse Pipelines and Fabric Pipelines), you have a typical scenario where you retrieve some metadata from a database and then loop over...
2024-06-27
136 reads
Database Build Error – Incorrect syntax near DISTINCT
I wrote a piece of SQL that had some new T-SQL syntax in it: IS DISTINCT FROM. This predicate checks if two expressions are equal taking NULL into account....
2025-01-03 (first published: 2024-06-24)
705 reads
Speaking at dataMinds Connect 2024
I’m very excited to announce I’ve been selected as a speaker for dataMinds Connect 2024, Belgium’s (and maybe/probably/most likely mainland Europe’s) best and greatest Microsoft data platform conference. My...
2024-06-17
16 reads
Dynamic Warehouse & Lakehouse Connections in Microsoft Fabric Data Pipelines
When you develop data pipelines in Microsoft Fabric (the Azure Data Factory equivalent in Fabric, not to be confused with deployment pipelines), you will most likely have some activities...
2024-07-01 (first published: 2024-06-13)
443 reads
System Views in Microsoft Fabric – Query references an object that is not supported in distributed processing mode
I have a metadata-driven ELT framework that heavily relies on dynamic SQL to generate SQL statements that load data from views into a respective fact or dimension. Such a...
2024-07-08 (first published: 2024-06-08)
766 reads
PostgreSQL error in Fabric Pipelines – No pg_hba.conf Entry for Host
I came across a bit of a weird error when I was trying to connect to a PostGreSQL database (hosted as an Azure DB for PostGreSQL), where “xx.xx.xx.xxx” is...
2024-06-07
234 reads
Book Review – Fundamentals of Data Engineering
This book was recommended by some of my colleagues, so I decided to give it a try. After finishing the book, I was pleased that I did. As the...
2024-06-24 (first published: 2024-06-05)
468 reads
Planview Portfolios REST API with ADF – Retrieving Actual Data
In the introduction of this blog post series, I explained the use case: extracting data from the Planview Portfolios REST API using Azure Data Factory. Any tool that can...
2024-06-19 (first published: 2024-05-26)
217 reads
Blogs
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Advice I Like: In 100 Years
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
Forums
AllocationType as ROW_OVERFLOW_DATA
Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...
is it true we cant debug c# scripts in ssis anymore under vs
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
Question of the Day
Missing the Jaro Winkler Distance
I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:
SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.What is wrong? See possible answers