Business-Intelligence

I often need to capture the changes from one database into another. The most common reason is that I’m wanting to bring changes from a transactional system across into a data warehouse that’s part of a BI setup. So which technology is best to use for this? That’s not a trivial question to answer but here are some thoughts: Replication? Unfortunately, this one’s not available for Azure SQL DB as yet.

2023-02-26

I’m always excited when I can get involved in conferences with our Polish friends. Coming up very soon is the Data Science Summit 2022: https://dssconf.pl/en/ For this summit, I’ll be presenting a quick (around 40 minutes) session highlighting what’s changed in T-SQL for SQL Server 2022. I’m always so glad to see T-SQL enhancements in SQL Server and SQL Server 2022 has more than what we’ve seen in other recent versions.

2022-11-06

One of our popular free resources is the SDU Tools library. If you haven’t checked it out, I’d encourage you to do so. It’s a large library of functions, procedures, and views all written in native T-SQL code. You can easily use it as a complete library, or use it as examples of how to write T-SQL code. v22 is now available for download. If you aren’t on our notification list, you can add yourself here:

2022-06-05

It’s been a while coming, but my latest book is now out. Implementing Power BI in the Enterprise is now available in both paperback and eBook. The eBook versions are available in all Amazon stores, and also through most book distributors through Ingram Spark distribution. I’ve had a few people ask about DRM-free ePub and PDF versions. While the Kindle version on Amazon is their normal DRM setup, you can purchase the DRM free version directly from us here:

2021-06-18

One of my favourite conferences each year is SQL Day. It’s run by an enthusiastic group from Poland, and when I’ve attended in person, I loved it. This year it’s virtual, and the upside of that, is you can attend from anywhere. As part of the conference, I’m running a pre-con workshop. It’s a low cost one day course on How I Implement Power BI in Enterprises. You’ll find info on it here.

2021-04-16

I’m a big fan of Azure Data Factory (ADF), but one of the things you need to get used to with tools like this, is that the UI keeps changing over time. That makes it hard for several reasons: It’s hard to train people. Any recorded demo you have will show them things that no longer exist, within a fairly short period of time. Every time a cosmetic change occurs, it immediately devalues blog posts, tutorials, etc.

2021-03-09

I’ve seen many challenges with analytics over the years. One that’s painful is an inability to explain where analytic data came from. Someone looks at a report, sees a value, and says I don’t believe that number. Don’t put yourself in that position ! Lineage I load analytics from data warehouses. Most of my data warehouses are SQL Server databases of some type. Currently, they’re almost always Azure SQL Databases. I like to include information in the database, about how the data got there i.

2021-01-13

I love the way that tools like Power BI have made creating analytics approachable for a much wider range of users. The skills acquired when doing this are a great start for using analytics in enterprises, but an area that I still see missing is data modelling. What I see users doing is this: Decide what the output reports, etc. should look like Design tables that match the reports. And this is where things go wrong.

2021-01-07

I was really excited today to see details of the upcoming #dataweek. Anything with a name like that already has my interest. In this case though, there’s a #CreateData event that’s happening as part of #dataweek. And the focus of that looks to be on Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure Synapse Analytics I know that many of my readers won’t have spent much time with Azure Synapse Analytics. The product has grown out of Azure SQL Data Warehouse (note not Azure SQL Database) but it’s now much more than just an upgraded Azure SQL DW.

2020-11-25

I work with a lot of technology on a daily basis, much of it amazing. But I still get excited when relatively small enhancements are made, and they make my life or development much better. Timezone support in schedule triggers in Azure Data Factory is one of those changes. Schedule Triggers In Data Factory, the most common type of trigger that we use is a schedule trigger. It’s used to run a pipeline at a specific time or series of times.

2020-11-04