The Bit Bucket

Just a heads-up that v24 of SDU Tools went out to SDU Insiders last week. If you haven’t used SDU Tools, they are just a large library of functions implemented in T-SQL. You can use them as a full library or use them as examples of code in work you are trying to do.

Backwards Compatibility

We’ve also tried to keep all the code working for all versions of SQL Server that we see clients using. That means from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2022. We also have an Azure SQL DB version.

2024-09-10

I had some clear time this morning so I read a recent book called Deciphering Data Architectures (Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh) by James Serra.

Price

One comment I need to make is that for some reason, the O’Reilly titles seem to have become more expensive lately, and their freight options are expensive too. It was the same for this book. It was $112 AUD landed at my place. That’s so much more than any similar book that I’ve read lately, and this is not a large book.

2024-08-15

I recently received another eBook for review from our friends at PackT. This time it was an early release copy of the Third Edition of the Microsoft Power BI Cookbook by Greg Deckler and Brett Powell.

Cookbook Style?

I’m a fan of books written in a cookbook style, rather than a teaching style. Often, people already know the basics and just want to get prompted on how to do specific tasks.

2024-08-03

What many people who follow me don’t know, is that I spent a lot of years playing baseball. Early on I played third base, later I pitched, and my last position was usually catcher or first base.

I love the game. What is less known is that I also spent many years umpiring baseball, through to state level. I umpired in the Pan-Pacific games in Queensland.

Umpiring requires a very detailed knowledge of the rules of the game. Umpires must pass annual rules examinations. If you want to umpire at higher levels of competition, you must pass the exams at a higher level.

2024-08-02

Welcome to show 3 for PG Down Under!

Once again, I really enjoyed recording today’s show. It features Ryan Booz. Ryan is an evangelist with our friends at Red-Gate, focussing on PostgreSQL.

In this show, Ryan shares his experiences with community in relation to PostgreSQL. Next, we ventured into the challenges and benefits of being an application vendor working against PostgreSQL, and in particular, the extensibility model and how it compares to other products.

2024-07-25

Another Fabric Down Under podcast is out the door. This time it was with a another fellow “Down Under” guest Heidi Hasting from Adelaide.

Heidi Hasting is a Business Intelligence professional and former software developer with over ten years experience in Microsoft products.  She’s an MVP, MCT and holder of many certifications along with being an ALM/DLM enthusiast and Azure DevOps fan and co-founder and organiser of the Adelaide Power BI User Group.

2024-07-24

There was a question on the Q&A forums today, asking how to read data using SSIS, when it’s in this format:

|Col1| |Col2|Col3|Col|
|101| |A|21|DC|

One of the concerns was that there was a leading pipe. This is not a problem. When you have data like that, and you set | as the delimiter, because there are 6 delimiters, then there are 7 columns output. These are the values:

Column 1: blank string Column 2: 101 Column 3: blank string Column 4: A Column 5: 21 Column 6: DC Column 7: blank string

2024-07-19

A few weeks ago, I received another book from our friends at PackT. It was the second edition of Azure Data Factory Cookbook by Dmitry Foshin, Dmitry Anoshin, Tonya Chernyshova, and Xenia Ireton.

I liked the earlier version of this book, and I was pleased to see substantial work had gone into this second edition.

It’s interesting that the book doesn’t stick directly to Azure Data Factory (ADF) but also branches into topics on Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Fabric, and Databricks.

2024-06-14

Another book that I read recently was SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices Book Cover by Steve Hughes, Dennis Neer, Dr Ram Babu Singh, Shabbir H Mala, Leslie Andrews, and Chi Zhang. It also came from our friends at PackT publishing.

Purpose

The intro to the book says “This book is for the SQL developer who is ready to take their query development skills to the next level. This includes report writers, data scientists, or similar data gatherers and allows users to expand their skills for complex querying and build more efficient and performant queries.”

2024-06-11

I was excited to see Gus Frazer’s new book on Data Cleaning with Power BI. Our friends at PackT sent a copy for me to take a look at.

Gus has a background with both Power BI and Tableau, and it’s always interesting to see a mix of perspectives in any book. In this book, he shows a variety of data cleaning/cleansing tasks, then how to do many of them with M in Power Query. And you can tell Gus has a teaching background. because chapters have review questions. The book could well support a course.

2024-06-10