Stairway Series

Stairway to Synapse Analytics

Level 4 of the Stairway to Synapse Analytics: Create and Use a Delta Lake

  • Stairway Step

Introduction In Level 1 of this series, I discussed Synapse Analytics basics and the steps for creating the Synapse Workspace. In Level 2, we analyzed Data Lake files using the Serverless SQL Pool. In Level 3, we analyzed Data Lake files using the Spark Pool. In Levels 4 and level 5, I will discuss the Delta […]

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2025-06-06 (first published: )

1,872 reads

Stairway to Synapse Analytics

Level 2 of the Stairway to Synapse Analytics: Analyze Data in Storage Account using the Serverless SQL pool

  • Stairway Step

In this second level of the Stairway to Synapse, we learn how to create external tables and query data that is stored in our data storage using the serverless pool.

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2025-06-06 (first published: )

1,031 reads

Stairway to DAX and Power BI

Level 27: Time Intelligence – Dates Functions: The DAX “Parallel Period” and “Same Period Last Year” Functions

  • Stairway Step

Business Intelligence Architect, “Analysis Services Maestro, and author Bill Pearson introduces two somewhat similar DAX Time Intelligence functions related to “parallel” Date periods: PARALLELPERIOD() and SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR(). He discusses the syntax, uses and operation of each function, and then provides hands-on exposure to it in Power BI.

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2024-01-24

1,807 reads

Stairway to Database DevOps

Stairway to Database DevOps Level 4: Creating a new Azure Pipeline (with Azure SQL DB Deployment)

  • Stairway Step

The first three levels of this series have been the lead-up to this level, automating the database deployment with Azure Pipelines. First, we started with an introduction to Azure DevOps and the Git client. Next, SQL Source Control was introduced to manage a database’s schema and manually deploy changes from the database to source control […]

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2023-12-06

2,401 reads

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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