Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Also check out my dbo.weekly newsletter about #allthingsdata and SQL Server.
Concept You may have come across a term multi-tiered storage. This means, that the storage solution has multiple arrays, fast and expensive and slow but cheap. Files accessed very frequently are stored on very fast SSD disks, files accessed less frequently are stored on the much cheaper but much slower
Abstract PowerBI Desktop is a data analytics and presentation tool. Defining data sets is very easy and usually involves creating connection string to the source data and defining objects to pull data from. Alternatively, for SQL databases we can write custom SQL script to query source data. However, if we
As data professionals, we often need test data, whether for functional testing, to satisfy business logic criteria or for non-functional, to satisfy performance requirements. We must also not store any sensitive or personal information in non-production systems and doing so could be against Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). A common approach
I often help improve the performance of a SQL Server or an application. Performance metrics in SQL Server are exposed via Dynamic Management Views (DMVs). However, DMVs only provide a view of the current state and no history. This is important as it makes it particularly difficult to draw a bigger picture of how the system is behaving over time and what problems are occurring during overnight batch processing or during peak operational times, for example when users log in to the system at 8 am or when they leave for lunch at 1 pm. To address this deficiency I have built a simple yet comprehensive SQL Server Performance Dashboard in PowerBI.
I recently got an ultra wide screen and realised that the Windows taskbar is a bit of waste. Let me explain. On an ultra wide screen, the task bar will be very likely just empty most of the time, taking up the precious Y axis of the screen: Since there
The identity value in relational databases is a field that increases automatically. It is often used to create surrogate primary keys. Surrogate keys Surrogate keys are meaningless and are only used to uniquely identify the row, not the data itself. For example, assume the following table: As we can see,
This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Kenneth Fisher and is quite interesting as it has nothing to do with T-SQL. Here’s my very short contribution Multi-line typing with Alt Mind blowing hack that works in majority of text and code editors. Press Alt and highlight the area where you
I lot of you have asked me to expand on the automated SQL Server installation I mentioned in my previous article: dbatools is a free PowerShell module with over 500 SQL Server best practice, administration, development and migration commands included https://dbatools.io/ The dbatools team have spent long hours making sure
Being able to run virtual machines on our local computers, whether for testing or development is very convenient and almost natural. Hyper-V is part of Windows and is an obvious choice for many. The main advantage is that it’s free. And that’s about it. This post is based on recent
As a DBA, developer, and more importantly the creator of SQLWATCH.IO, I need the ability to rapidly deploy and test different SQL Server configurations or test different upgrade variations from one version of SQLWATCH to another. This is quite laborious, time-consuming tasks as I either have to build a new SQL