Business-Intelligence

In recent years, I’ve done a lot of work in software houses (Microsoft calls them ISVs or Independent Software Vendors). Many of these software houses have worked out that they won’t be able to just keep selling their on-premises applications because their customers are asking for cloud-based solutions.

And more importantly, the customers want the software houses to manage the applications rather than themselves. So, many of the software houses start trying to turn their on-premises applications into Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

2019-08-15

A few months back, I started noticing that many of our clients had started to mention Snowflake.

In recent years, I’ve been in lots of planning and architectural meetings where there was already a presumption that AWS was being used rather than Azure. I put that down to a great selling job by the AWS people who got corporate IT folk locked into large enterprise agreements early. And so no matter what the technical question is, the answer will be something that runs on AWS.

2019-08-09

I really love SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). In fact, I wish Microsoft was giving it far more love than it is. So many of my clients use it, but unfortunately, not everyone uses it well, or for the right things.

One really common mistake is to perform lots of row-by-row logic within the SSIS packages. Let’s take an example of loading a fact table in a data warehouse as an example:

2019-07-02

I spend a lot of time doing consulting that involves Power BI. One of the core skills for working with Power BI is getting yourself comfortable with the M language that’s used in Power Query.

I was asked the other day, how to create a function that determines if a date is a weekday or a weekend. That’s actually quite easy. The Date.DayOfWeek function can be adapted to do that.

2019-06-28

One of my Kiwi buddies who specializes in Power BI is Reza Rad. I was pleased to see he had a set of eBooks now on Power BI but was especially happy to see he had a book called Pro Power BI Architecture.

There are lots of books around to discuss how to use Power BI but there’s been a real lack of books on architecting solutions using Power BI. So if you want to learn to develop dashboards or reports, this isn’t the book for you. Reza has other books for that.

2019-05-10

I love working with SQL Server spatial. Don’t just use boring tables and charts. Spatial data can really help to bring your reports and analytics to life.  Don’t assume spatial is just about maps. (It’s not). Don’t assume you don’t have spatial data. (I’m sure you have addresses, locations, etc.)

We’ve been working hard lately on getting many of our popular in-person courses, converted to being available online and on-demand. We’re really proud to now have SQL Server Spatial for Developers and DBAs available.

2019-01-25

I spend a lot of time on client sites and time and again, one of the mistakes that I see people making, is trying to start with large projects. I think one of my all time favorite quotes about IT is:

Any successful large IT system used to be a successful small IT system.

The next time you’re thinking about creating a project that’s going to have a big bang outcome, please remember this. The history of the industry is that it really is likely to be a big bang, and not in terms of being a big success like you’d hoped for.

2019-01-18

Recently, I posted about the templates folder for SQL Server Reporting Services designer moving in Visual Studio 2017. You’ll find that blog post here.

I’ve also now found that the Private Assemblies folder has moved too. I do wish these locations would be fixed, shared, and known rather than needing to play hide and seek when updates are made to the SSRS designer tooling.

The Private Assemblies folder was used to hold a copy of any .NET assemblies that are referenced in your SSRS projects. By using .NET assemblies, you can share logic that’s used in reports. It’s worth noting that wherever we can, we try to avoid using .NET assemblies for this, and wish that SSRS had a way of dealing with common code inclusions, but that’s a topic for another day.

2018-06-18

I’m always telling students that one of the first things you need to learn to do when working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is to create report templates.

Now I really wish that SSRS had a real templating system, but what we have at present is just a folder that contains the items that we can create. For example, in an SSRS project, if I right-click Reports, and click Add, then New Item:

2018-06-12

In  a recent blog post, I wrote about the ANSI_NULLS option for tables and after that I had several more questions related to NULL values.

Note that I mentioned NULL values, not values of NULL, and not values equal to NULL. That’s because “being NULL” is a state that a value is in, not itself a value. That’s why our queries say IS NULL and not = NULL.

Now because of that, many developers see values that  are NULL as a pain in the neck as they have to be dealt with separately, unlike other values. This can lead to many poor design decisions but I want to start today with the decision to use magic values.

2018-04-10