I’ve mentioned that I love it when SQL Server gets new T-SQL functionality.
A useful function that was added in SQL Server 2016 was STRING_SPLIT. You can see it in action in the main image for this post.
It’s another function that is great as far as it goes, but when I was a kid, this would be described as “nice try but no cigar”.
It works, and it’s fast, so what’s missing. I think three things:
2017-12-06
When designing databases, one question that comes up all the time is how large columns should be.
For numbers, the answer is always big enough but not too big. This week I’ve been working at a site where the client numbers were stored in int columns. Given the clients are Australians and the Australian Bureau of Statistics Population Clock says there are just under 25 million of us, an integer seems a pretty safe bet, given it can store positive numbers up over two billion. It’s hard to imagine that number being exceeded, but I’ve seen people deciding that it needs to be a bigint. I doubt that. Even if we count all our furry friends, we aren’t going to get to that requirement.
2017-11-27
I had the great pleasure to record another SQL Down Under podcast last week with the Power BI general manager Kamal Hathi.
In the show, Kamal and I discuss the current state and potential futures for Power BI, its relationship to SQL Server Reporting Services, and its development and extensibility models.
You’ll find the show here: https://sqldownunder.com/podcast
I hope you enjoy it.
Note: We had a few unexpected audio issues with the recording. Sorry about that. We’ll do better next time :-) It’s still pretty good and I’ll still think you’ll find it interesting.
2017-11-24
Many people know that I have an issue with ORMs (object relational mappers). It’s worth spending a blog post to describe why.
Unfortunately, I spend my life on the back end of trying to deal with the messes involved. The following are the key issues that I see:
Potentially horrid performance
I’ve been on the back end of this all the time. There are several reasons. One is that the frameworks generate horrid code to start with, the second is that they are typically quite resistant to improvement, the third is that they tend to encourage processing with far too much data movement.
2017-11-07
It seems like anyone that’s talked to me this year has heard me going on and on about how Power Query is just the nicest new bit of tech that’s come from Microsoft lately. We cover it as part of our one-day Power BI Core Skills training class and as part of day 2 in our BI Core Skills classes that we recently updated for SQL Server 2014. Out of all the technologies that people see during that week, Power Query is the one that seems to promote the biggest discussions.
2014-06-28
When Power View appeared, one of the big outcries was “but what about connecting to existing cubes!”.
Great to see that the SQL Server team have addressed that. A tool that allows connecting Power View to SSAS Multidimensional cubes is now available.
(NOTE: CTP no longer available)
Help the team get this out the door by trying it and providing feedback.
2012-11-30
Over the years, I’ve seen several causes of this error in SQL Server Integration Services but today I came across another one.
You can get this error if you’ve used 3rd party components (particularly data sources) and the licensing for those components has expired.
Hope that helps someone sometime.
2011-12-13
With SQL Server, there often seems to be an over-emphasis on the items that provide bullet points for the marketing brochure. Yet, small but useful changes to the product can make a more profound impact on DBAs/developers than the new items that are highlighted by those bullet points.
One of the things I loved about Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2 is the amount of focus they provided on ease of use. In particular, the addition of data bars, lookup functions, pagination control, rendering targets in expressions, domain scope, etc. made a huge difference to anyone that really needs to build reports.
2011-09-11
When using the Usage Based Optimization wizard (or the Aggregation Design Wizard), on the screen that asks you to enter counts. There is a button that says “Count” but after using it, you might still be confronted by the message ““Estimated Count or Partition Count must be specified for cube objects that require counting”. It’s not overly helpful, given you have just asked it to count them itself.
If you see this, look through the list of dimensions and find any that have red squiggles under them. Then open each and find the attributes that also have squiggles and update those counts. Make sure that all squiggles disappear.
2011-07-06
Another book that I re-read while travelling last week was Fast Track to MDX. I still think that it’s the best book that I’ve seen for introducing the core concepts of MDX. My colleague Mark Whitehorn, along with Mosha Pasumansky and Robert Zare do an amazing job of building MDX knowledge throughout the book.
I had dinner with Mark in London a few years back and I was pestering him to update this book. The biggest limitation of the book is that it was written for SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, yet it still provides an excellent introduction to MDX. The knowledge from the three authors and Mark’s entertaining writing style make this still a “must-have” book for anyone learning MDX.
2011-06-21
