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? For this week’s query exercise, the business …
Find Posts with the Wrong CommentCount: Answers & Discussion
Your Query Exercise was to find denormalization accuracy problems: checking the accuracy of a reporting column, Posts.CommentCount. There were two parts: finding the top 100 most problematic Posts with the biggest variances, and thinking about a long t …
We’re Starting to Automate Testing for the First Responder Kit.
Brent says: It’s really funny how the world works. I wrote what you see below in December 2023 and scheduled it for publication on January 16th (today), hoping to get help from the community to get this process started. On January 9, before the p …
Working on Technology Off the Clock
I have always spent time learning relational databases on my own, non-work time. As the years have passed, I have spent less of my own free time on technical learning and writing for many reasons, but still, I spend plenty of my own time learning about …
A Simple Method to Load Excel Data
Problem When we need to load data from Excel sheets to a SQL Server table, we typically use a data flow task. This task doesn’t have the flexibility that we often need and requires a strict orchestration of components to be able to work consistently. T …
[Video] Office Hours: Ask Me Anything About the Microsoft Data Platform
Forgive the hoarse voice – I’m recovering from something COVID-ish. I went through your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and did my best: Here’s what we covered: 00:00 Start 03:03 DBANoob: We have EF code that …
Dimensional Modelling Case Study Part 1 – Age Group
Background Age plays an important role in medicine and medical research. A patient’s ages is commonly grouped into small number of age ranges, reflecting the severity of certain disease on different age groups. With COVID-19 still ravaging the world, i …
Query Exercise: Find Posts with the Wrong CommentCount
For 2024, I’m trying something new: weekly homework challenges! For this week’s query challenge, we’re going to do some data validation. Pop open the Stack Overflow database and check out the CommentCount column on the Posts table: In …
The Mastering Azure Data Studio Series
This is the index for a series of articles on Azure Data Studio (ADS), which will help you understand how to work with this tool and become productive when developing or managing code on SQL Server. The articles in this series are: Getting Started with …
Semantic Model: More than a Simple Name Change
The animation on the top of this article tries to track the evolution of the enterprise architecture since SQL Server 7.0 introduced tools for ETL, Semantic model and much more. Some of you probably remember these tools as SSIS and SSAS. At that t …
Find Foreign Key Problems: Answers & Discussion
Your Query Exercise was to find foreign key problems: data that might stop us from successfully implementing foreign keys in the Stack Overflow database. Question 1: Write queries to find the problematic data. Montro1981’s thorough answer broke t …
Adding Cookie Consent to SQL Server Central
To comply with various regulatory requirements, we are adding a cookie consent form to the website. You will see this banner at the bottom if you have not accepted or rejected cookies before. You can control which types of cookies and data you are allo …
Connecting SQL Server to SaaS applications with a Linked Server
The post Connecting SQL Server to SaaS applications with a Linked Server appeared first on SQLServerCentral.
An In-Depth Look at MIXED_PAGE_ALLOCATION and Changes in Page Allocation
When it comes to managing data in SQL Server, efficient page allocation is crucial for performance and storage utilization. In recent years, there have been significant changes in the way SQL Server allocates pages for data storage, specifically with t …
Announcing the 2024 Data Professional Salary Survey Results.
This is the 8th year now that we’ve been running our annual Data Professional Salary Survey, and I was really curious to see what the results would hold this year. How would inflation and layoffs impact the database world? Download the raw data h …