The Bit Bucket

Last week I had an opportunity to record a new podcast with Kasper DeJonge from the SQL Server Analysis Services team. Kasper has also been working on Power Pivot and many other areas.

SQL Server 2016 is lining up to be a great release for Analysis Services with significant enhancements for both tabular and multi-dimensional data models.

I hope you enjoy the show. You’ll find it here:

https://podcast.sqldownunder.com

2016-04-09

I spend a lot of my time working with ISVs (or software houses) and with individual developers. For SQL Server to have a long-term future, we need to be appealing to more and more new developers, to get them to understand that SQL Server is a great platform for building their applications above.

One of the most important aspects of this right up front, is making it really frictionless to get started with SQL Server.

2016-04-04

Hi Folks,

I recently got to record a new podcast with Riccardo Muti and Chris Finlan from the SQL Server Reporting Services team.

Over recent years, Reporting Services seemed to be in a rut without forward momentum.

2016 however promises to be a really big year for Reporting Services.

You’ll find the show here: SQL Down Under Podcast

Enjoy!

2016-03-13

In recent months, I’ve been brushing up my R skills. I’ve had a few areas of interest in this:

* R in Azure Machine Learning

* R in relation to Power BI and general analytics

* R embedded (somewhat) in SQL Server 2016

As a client tool, I’ve been using RStudio. It’s been good and very simple but it’s a completely separate environment. So I was excited when I saw there was to be a preview of new R tooling for Visual Studio.

2016-03-10

Hi Folks,

My series of articles for SQL Server Magazine continues. Last month, I started a short series about a large database that needed to go on a diet. This month, I look at a bit of the internals of row and page compression, to see what happens with you use this.

http://sqlmag.com/database-administration/data-tales-7-case-database-diet-part-2

Enjoy!

2016-03-09

We normally run our Power BI Core Skills class as the 2nd day of the week in our 5 day BI Core Skills.

We’ve had extra demand for the Power BI day so we’ve added an extra one in Melbourne on May 10th. Details are here:

SQL Down Under Training

Early bird pricing ends April 26th.

2016-03-05

I love it when I get queries that are actually easy to answer.

Today, one of my developer friends asked me if it was better to use BETWEEN or to use >= and <= when filtering for a range of dates.

From a logic perspective, I like the idea that a single predicate expresses your intent rather than needing two predicates to do the same. For example, consider the following two queries:

2016-03-02

Hi Folks,

My next article for SQL Server Magazine is out now. I’ve decided that New Year is the time that most people discuss diets and databases don’t have to be an exception.

I’m discussing one large client who had a database that really needed to be trimmed down. That involved a whole range of mechanisms and the outcome was great: major size reduction and significant performance improvement.

I’ve decided to discuss this across a series of articles, each covering part of the story about how the reductions were produced and the rationale for each.

2016-01-28

This one is here so that I don’t forget it in future.

I’ve been writing Powershell again all day today and I spent ages trying to find this error when instantiating a particular object.

Bottom line is that there was a valid constructor that took a single string argument. However, I was passing an empty string to the constructor. Let’s just leave it at “The error message returned is interesting”.

2016-01-17

Just realised that book icons are another one that will probably lose meaning over time. That’ll apply to book icons for dictionaries and thesauruses too.

Phone icons are already pretty odd as many kids would never have seen a phone that looks like those icons.

And the Save icons that are a picture of a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk are basically meaningless now.

I had to laugh when I heard a kid who saw a 3 1/2 inch floppy for the first time comment that someone had made “a actual save icon”. I suppose that’s how it seemed to him.

2016-01-01